King Me
by OughtaKnowBetter
Summary: Abby is called to testify in a case in a small town. When she gets kidnapped, Gibbs and the team must find her and solve an old case. Complete story.
1. Chapter 1

King Me

By OughtaKnowBetter

* * *

"DiNozzo!" Gibbs bellowed from behind the crate. "DiNozzo! Do not—I repeat, do _not!_—get your ass kicked, or I swear I will send you to Kings Point every weekend for a month!"

A bullet whizzed by Tony DiNozzo's head, almost giving him a reason to see his hair stylist on an emergency visit. He pulled back, stuck out his own handgun and aimed a return bullet in the general direction of the foe. "Easy for him to say," he grunted sourly to McGee crouched next to him. "He's not the one who has to take Abby there to testify."

McGee flattened himself against his own crate, praying that the wood would be stout enough to prevent the bullets from smashing through the fibers into his back. He waited for the noise to diminish and a break in the hail of lead. "I don't see what's so bad about taking Abby—"

"You ever been to Kings Point, McGee?"

"No, but—"

"You go, and you'll see what's so bad about it." DiNozzo tried to send off another message to the enemy, something in the realm of 'surrender, Dorothy', and cursed when he realized that the clip was empty. "It would almost be worth it to get shot, just so I don't have to go." He fumbled for another clip, ramming it home so that he could continue to defend himself.

McGee fired twice during the interlude, and huddled behind his crate while the enemy fired back, watching DiNozzo ram the other clip home. "You've been there? Kings Point, I mean."

"Damn right, I have. Before your time, McWet-Behind-The-Ears. Ziva's, too."

"It's that bad?"

"Worse," DiNozzo groaned. "Damn. How soon are they gonna run out of bullets?"

"It sounds like it's letting up." Another flurry of shots made talking impossible for six long seconds. McGee winced. "Or not. What was in Kings Point?"

DiNozzo viciously fired another singleton, more as an expression of annoyance than for any hope of improving the odds. "A bunch of years ago. It was me, and Gibbs, and a couple of yo-yo's who have since moved on. Somebody killed a girl in the back woods somewhere, tried to use some navy slob for an alibi."

"Gibbs cleared him?"

"Not exactly. Turned out the navy guy was busy conducting his own criminal acts at the time. Gibbs took him down without breaking a sweat. Then he got Bosley to go out to testify on behalf of NCIS—I think it was right before Bos retired—and Abby got called to present the forensic evidence for the Kings Point case. I got roped into escort duty."

"They put the guy away?"

"A Gibbs case? You better believe it, Probie." DiNozzo frowned. "What the hell is Ziva doing? She trying to get herself killed?"

"Where is she?"

"Up on top of the crates." DiNozzo didn't gesture at the Israeli officer, for fear of drawing attention to her. "A little closer…little closer…Got you, piece of pond scum! Way to go, Ziva!"

"Exit one bad guy," McGee observed. "Now, how about the other five?" He returned to the topic. "I take it that Kings Point isn't a popular hotspot."

"You know those polls that rate a town entertainment value by the number of bowling alleys and paintball playgrounds?"

"Yeah."

"That's Kings Point. Bowling alleys. Beer joints; not a single decent night club for fifty miles around. Their idea"—bang!—"of a good meal is ribs and beans."

"Tony, the art of making ribs—"

"Is highly over-rated, Probie. Ribs are good, but give me a bottle of wine, a French chef—gotcha', you little bugger!" DiNozzo blew gently and artistically over the top of his handgun. "There's a reason that I live in the big bad city, McGeek, and it has something to do with the fact that I _like_ it. Why couldn't Gibbs send _you_ along with Ziva to escort Abby?"

McGee added his own contribution to the firefight, and shrugged. "Why don't you ask him, Tony?"

"Get real, McFanciful." DiNozzo snorted. "What are the odds of _two_ cases ending up in Kings Point? Two completely unrelated cases. No, I take that back; _everyone_ is related in Kings Point. They're all cousins, and they're all inbred," he snarled. "_And_ they're all involved in crime." He huddled behind his crate.

McGee aimed another round. "Why doesn't Gibbs do the escort duty? I thought he liked tiny little rural towns."

"Not as much as his boat, Probie."

"Oh. Right." McGee frowned, pulling back to safety. "Missed."

"Don't miss again, McGee. I'm getting tired of this gig."

"Me, too. Is the SWAT Team getting here any time soon?"

"Sure hope so. I heard they've been cutting their arrival time by a third."

"Big deal. That means that they arrive in forty minutes instead of an hour."

"Yeah." DiNozzo lapsed into an annoyed silence, a lack of sound that was interrupted some three to six times per second by gunfire.

"You think the boss'll get tired of waiting?"

"I think _Ziva _will get tired of waiting."

DiNozzo was right. The next thing they heard was a female voice, heavily laced with exasperation.

"If you don't put down your weapon _now_, I will shoot you in the back of your neck."

There was a heavy pause in the action. DiNozzo chanced a look around his shielding crate to see Ziva with a heavy handgun in her hands, the muzzle aimed at one of the suspects at a distance that all but guaranteed a fatal shot if the suspect decided not to cooperate.

He saw something else, too: another suspect, creeping up on her from behind. He opened his mouth to shout out a warning—then relaxed.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Gibbs said calmly to the second suspect. "I don't think I can miss from here."

It was over. The rest laid down their weapons and surrendered.

* * *

"Anybody got any smaller handcuffs?" DiNozzo grumbled, locking the manacles around the suspect's wrists. The man that he had charge of was the shortest of the group, neatly clipped hair now grimy with sweat. Gibbs surveyed the man with distaste; clearly getting chased into an abandoned warehouse for a frenzied shoot out had not been on the suspect's plans for the evening. So sorry, really ought to have planned better. He tightened his lips, and DiNozzo snorted, the senior field agent keeping a restraining hand on the man's arm so that he couldn't escape the iron fetters without notice. "Just don't try anything, Jones," DiNozzo advised the man. "I don't feel like chasing you down, not at this time of night, and I'm faster than you are."

"This was entrapment!" Farland Jones objected. "I want a lawyer! You can't do this to me—"

"Can, and will," Gibbs advised him dryly, keeping an eye on the monster of a man that Ziva had subdued. McGee had taken charge of the other two, both clutching leg wounds and waiting for the medics to get to them for a detour through an emergency room before hollering for their own legal representatives. Gibbs eyed DiNozzo. _At least you made through a fire fight without collecting a bullet. _"You're still on escort duty to Kings Point, DiNozzo."

"I know, boss." DiNozzo didn't even attempt a smile. Gibbs would have seen through it, would administer a head-whack at the slightest provocation. "Both bags are already packed. Ready to leave in the morning."

"Me, too, Gibbs," Ziva added. "It's not as though I require much, for a three day trip. A single bag will suffice," she added in a clear snipe at her fellow agent's travel habits.

"Good," Gibbs grunted. "Let's move 'em out." He cocked his head, listening. "Hah."

"SWAT Team?" Ziva couldn't help but ask.

"Right on time," DiNozzo opined. He tapped Jones on the shoulder. "After you. Down the steps. Don't trip, or I may have to let you fall down the stairs and break your neck."

"You wish," Jones sneered. "I'm gonna sue your ass. You're gonna be out of a job so fast that you'll never know what hit you. Hope you got a lot of cash in your piggy bank, 'cause you're gonna need all of it to exist on bread and water."

"Less talk, more walk," DiNozzo advised him. "Move."

Jones's mouth continued to flap as DiNozzo guided him out through the door to the long flight of steps leading down to the nighttime air outside. "Look, I'm gonna give you a break this time. You cut me loose now, before this goes any further, and I won't sue you, okay?"

"Hah. You were _shooting_ at me, genius. Any jury is going to take one look at the evidence, and they'll throw away the key. Try again."

Jones did. He changed his tune. "How about a deal, man? You can work me a deal? I know people; lots of people. I can give you dealers. Big dealers, really big."

DiNozzo pretended to consider. "Keep walking, Jones."

Jones stepped down the stairs, sensing an opening. "I _know_ people, man. I know where they drop, who the connections are—"

He misstepped. Jones half-turned to try to put more earnestness into his voice and pleading into his face and missed the stair tread entirely. With his hands cuffed behind him, he had no way to stop himself from falling.

DiNozzo lunged to catch him. His hand was already on Jones's arm, and only required a tightening of the fingers to secure his hold on his suspect.

Jones didn't realize that. He twisted, trying to save himself, and only succeeded in throwing his rescuer off balance.

They both went down.

DiNozzo yelled, hitting his shoulder against the rickety railing that did next to nothing to provide for safety in the warehouse. He grabbed for a hand hold and found nothing. Jones toppled head first down the long flight of stairs, DiNozzo tangled up with him, both bumping every third step until they came to rest with a thud on the concrete landing below.

Neither one moved.

"DiNozzo!" Gibbs shoved his own suspect toward Ziva, trusting the Mossad officer to keep both men under control. He took the steps two at a time, dashing toward the pair at the bottom of the stairs.

Jones was the first to wake, and to talk. "He pushed me!" Jones accused. "You saw him! He pushed me! I'm gonna sue—"

"Shut up!" Gibbs snarled. "DiNozzo! Wake up!"

Nothing. Eyes shut, body limp, muscles slack. Out cold.

Gibbs felt for a pulse, almost panicking before he felt the slow throb against his fingertips. He looked back up the stairs at the other two NCIS agents, watching him with wide eyes. Gibbs wasted no time. "Get the medics here _now_."

* * *

_Odd feeling, this._

_Almost but not quite aware of what's going on around me. Jones, hollering his lungs out, asking for his lawyer. Good thing I can't really hear what's he's saying. Administering a Gibbs-style head-whack to the guy is really what he needs, never mind that it would earn me a reprimand from above if I'm lucky and a lawsuit if Jones gets his way._

_Still…_

_Can't move my arms. Not quite sure why. They just don't seem to be working particularly well at the moment. Legs are pretty inept, too. I've seen jello that moved better than me right now._

_Ziva is peering down at me. How in the name of all that's holy did she get to be so tall?_

_Oh…I'm flat on my back. What the hell am I doing on my back? Head hurts like a mother…_

_Gibbs's mouth is moving. Not much in the way of sound coming out. Maybe if I concentrate on his lips I can figure out what he's saying over the roaring in my ears. Face sliding in and out of focus…C'mon, I don't need reading glasses yet. I'm not that old…_

_Crap, my head hurts. Stop shining that damn light in my eyes!_

_Hurts to think. I think a short little nap is what I need right now. Don't think I've got much choice in the matter…_

* * *

"Concussion." Gibbs let his gaze follow the wheeled stretcher as the medics loaded it into the back of the ambulance. "He'll be okay." It was a statement. It was a command. It was a promise that Leroy Jethro Gibbs was determined to find a way to make come true if he had to go to hell and back.

Unfortunately, the ambulance was only going to head toward the nearest Emergency Department. Hell was not part of the route, and nothing was going to interfere with getting Gibbs's senior field agent to medical care as quickly as possible, because Gibbs himself was going to ride shotgun.

In the meantime, there was a battlefield to take control of. The SWAT team had outdone themselves, arriving in a bare thirty minutes, proving that they had been working on their response time. They were now milling around, shouting orders to each other and growling over who was in charge. Gibbs didn't have time for this. "McGee!" he growled.

"Boss?"

It was either McGee or Ziva, and Gibbs wasn't in the mood to clean up what would be left if the SWAT team got into a pissing contest with the Mossad officer. "McGee, you're in charge. Have a couple of these men escort those two over to County Medical; get 'em cleared for jail and charge 'em with assault. You and Ziva take Jones and the rest into custody and let 'em sit in a cell until morning; we'll figure out the rest of the charges then. I'm going with DiNozzo."

"Right." McGee paused. "He gonna be all right, boss?"

Gibbs glared. "Do I look like a doctor, McGee?"

"Uh…no, boss?"

Gibbs clambered into the ambulance, seating himself on the bench along the side so that he could watch DiNozzo breathe. "Just get those bastards back to NCIS and put 'em on ice. Oh, and McGee?"

"Yes, boss?"

"Pack your bag. You're taking DiNozzo's place, escorting Abby along with Ziva. Don't make a mess of it."

McGee gulped. "Uh, no, boss."

"Good." Gibbs rapped on the side of the van. "Let's get this wagon moving."

* * *

_Crap._

_Gibbs is gonna kill me._

_Probably a blessing. The way my head is feeling, it would be a mercy killing._

_Gibbs is gonna kill me. What the hell happened? Everything is a blank. I remember getting ready to take down a bunch of slimeballs, guy named Jones. Then what?_

_Oh, yeah. Shoot out. Got through that okay; remember Gibbs threatening me about stopping a bullet. Not gonna get out of taking Abby to Kings Point._

_What the hell happened?_

"Yes, Agent Gibbs, he's going to be fine. His periods of consciousness are growing longer and longer, and he's starting to remember what happened. We're just going to keep him overnight as a precaution."

_Not a voice I recognize. Female, non-threatening, authoritative. My superior powers of deductive reasoning tell me that a) something happened at the shoot out and b) that's a doctor talking to Gibbs._

_Crap. Gibbs is gonna kill me if I don't get my ass up in time to get Abby over to Kings Point to testify._

"Thanks, doc."

_Now that's a voice I recognize: Gibbs. Cool, calm, and collected; just like he's in from an evening stroll. Hah; an evening stroll armed with enough firepower to take down Al Capone._

_I am __so__ in trouble. Better do something about it, fast._

"I can take Abby…"

"What's that, DiNozzo?"

_Crap, I knew the words didn't come out. Better try again_.

"I can—"

_Crap. Crap. Somebody grabbing me, rolling me over. Like I have a snowball's chance in hell of doing something about it. Crap, I hate this. And in front of Gibbs, too. Can it get any worse?_

"Get him over on his side, so he doesn't aspirate. Jess, would you get him twenty five of prochlorperazine? Let's see if we can make him more comfortable. Don't worry, Agent Gibbs, throwing up like this is fairly normal with concussion."

"Seen it before."

_I'll just bet you have, boss, but not from me. Ruins the image_.

"Why don't you go home now, Agent Gibbs, and let Mr. DiNozzo get some rest?" the female voice suggested. "I'll plan on discharging him in the morning, when he feels better. Does he have any family that he can stay with for a day or so?"

_Not the Welsh Corgis from hell! Not the Welsh Corgis from hell!_

"I'll arrange something," Gibbs promised.

_Crap!_

"Excellent. Why don't you step outside, Agent Gibbs? Let the nurse administer something to make him feel better."

_Yeah. Feeling better would be really good right about now. Anything would be better than heaving my guts out._

_Maybe not—while I normally like having someone female and attractive grabbing my butt, this is not quite the way I imagined—_

_Ow!_


	2. Where were you wounded?

"I'll be springing DiNozzo later this morning," Gibbs informed his team. "Doc says he had a quiet night, and all the tests are coming back negative."

"That's good to hear, Jethro." Ducky seated himself behind DiNozzo's desk, knowing that the man wouldn't be there to object or even to mind. "Concussion, you said?"

"That's what the doc told me," Gibbs nodded.

"He's all right, then?" McGee asked, a small overnight back sitting on the floor behind him. A more upscale and sturdy leather case for a laptop leaned against it, the zipper bulging against the tech toys hidden inside. "He looked pretty out of it last night."

"Yeah, well, he isn't about to run the Boston Marathon," Gibbs agreed, "but he should be back to work in a day or so. In the meantime, you and Ziva need to get Abby out to Kings Point. Where is she?" he asked, annoyed that the lab rat wasn't present.

"Right here, Gibbs." Abby walked onto the floor, plopping herself on the edge of McGee's desk and folding her arms. Contrary to both Ziva and McGee, Abby had no luggage with her. She also had a set expression on her face.

Gibbs eyed her, his face unreadable. "Abby?"

Abby scowled. "I can't go, Gibbs."

"Oh? Why is that?" Danger signals wafted in the air.

Abby gestured. "You know."

"Not really, Abby. You know something I don't?"

"Gibbs!" she wailed. "You know I can't go with Tony in the hospital! What if he needs me?"

Gibbs was already prepared for the argument. "DiNozzo is not going to need you, Abby. He's got a hospital full of doctors and nurses catering to him."

"But what about when he goes home? He's all alone there, with nobody to help him!"

Ziva tried to comfort her. "Abby, don't be ridiculous. Tony has a black book filled with the phone numbers of dozens of women who would jump at the chance—"

"Yes, but none of them really _care_ about him! All they want—"

"Abby, if nothing better presents itself, then I shall offer Anthony the comforts of my home," Ducky interrupted. "It might surprise you to know that Mother, despite all her current troubles, was quite the competent nurse during The War. Why, as a lad, I remember taking in some of the fellows who had been wounded—"

"See, Abby?" McGee interrupted the interruption. "And Ducky's a doctor. What better could you ask for—?"

"He's a _pathologist!_ He sees _dead_ people—"

"You'd better get moving." Gibbs provided the final interruption. "You need to check in with the D.A. in Kings Point before four, and you've got several hours of driving ahead of you. Where's your bag?"

"You wouldn't let me bring the coffin—"

"It wouldn't fit in the trunk of the car, Abby." McGee tried to head off yet another explosion.

"The smaller one would!"

"But then we wouldn't be able to place our own luggage into the trunk," Ziva pointed out. "Come along, Abby. Get your things, and let's go."

"You'll look after Tony, Gibbs?" Abby turned a hopeful face to her hero.

"Yes, I will make sure that he's okay, Abby." Mixture of exasperation and understanding; Abby could push the boss further than any of the others on the team.

Only just so far, and Gibbs was giving the signal that enough was enough. "All right, Gibbs, but I'm holding you responsible for Tony," she warned him.

"That's fine, Abby. DiNozzo will be here when you get back." Gibbs deliberately turned to his despised computer, dismissing the lab rat to finish getting ready.

Abby sighed, scowling. She'd lost this round, never mind that she hadn't really expected to win.

Maybe she had. A promise from Gibbs that Anthony DiNozzo would be fine was nothing to sneer at. Gibbs always kept his word.

* * *

"You're driving too slowly, McGee."

"I'm driving at the speed limit, Ziva. There are laws, you know."

"Which everyone ignores, or haven't you noticed all the cars passing us on both the left and the right? I wish to arrive _today_, McGee, not some time next week!"

"And I want to arrive in _one piece_." McGee kept his hands clenched on the steering wheel. "How many tickets have you gotten in this year alone?"

"That's not fair, McGee! That was a speed trap, and you are well aware—"

"—that you got caught. If you weren't speeding, you wouldn't have gotten caught—"

"Can you guys, like, keep it down?" Abby put in plaintively from the back seat, pulling one ear bud from her ear. "Some of us are trying to sleep."

"Sleep? With that noise blasting in your ears?" Ziva shook her head in disbelief.

"It's soothing, Ziva. You should try it." Abby replaced the ear piece, and turned up the volume so that the pair in the front could hear the heavy beat as clearly as if they had front row seats. "How long before we get there?"

"GPS says one hour—"

"Only if you drive faster, McGee."

McGee ignored her. "We're making excellent time, Abby. We'll have time to refresh ourselves at the hotel before our meeting with the D.A."

Abby closed her eyes. "Only if the two of you don't kill each other before we get there," she muttered under her breath.

* * *

"Thanks, Gretchen." DiNozzo winked at the comely young thing who had wheeled him out to Gibbs's car. The sun shone brightly down on both of them, and the air was nicely toasty. Three pigeons looked up in hopes that someone would take pity on them, too, and were doomed to disappointment. DiNozzo put on one of his best smiles. "I'll call you."

"Good," Gretchen purred, helping him to stand and get into the passenger seat of Gibbs's car. "I want to make sure that you're feeling better." She handed him a small piece of white paper, not quite palmed into hiding.

"I'm sure I will." DiNozzo winked again, putting the small scrap of paper into his shirt pocket.

"I'm counting on it." She turned, taking the wheelchair back inside the hospital, making sure that her hips wiggled just _so_ on the return trip up the ramp.

Gibbs raised his eyebrows and let his gaze stray to DiNozzo's shirt pocket. "That what I think it is, DiNozzo?"

DiNozzo smiled. "Yes, boss."

"Didn't I see you get a phone number from Brandy, one of the nurses upstairs?"

"Yes, boss."

"And another from Faith, at the cashier's office?"

"Yes, boss."

Gibbs shook his head.

DiNozzo let a whole sixty seconds pass before broaching a topic considerably more dangerous than balancing three casual relationships. "Uh, boss?"

Gibbs proved once again that he had a graduate degree in mind-reading. "They should be arriving in Kings Point any minute, DiNozzo."

DiNozzo settled himself back against the fabric of the seat. "Good."

Gibbs crushed the smile on his face. "McGee took it like a man."

"McGee doesn't know what to expect in Kings Point. Neither does Ziva."

"They'll cope."

"Maybe."

"Want to head out there to help, DiNozzo?"

"No!" That answer shot out a little too quickly. DiNozzo back-pedalled, tried to relax against the back of the car seat once again. "No, that's okay. They can handle it. I'm on medical leave."

"Only until tomorrow," Gibbs pointed out.

"Desk duty."

"And I'll need you there," Gibbs agreed with a suspiciously agreeable air. "After all, McGee is in Kings Point. I need someone to ride herd on the computer thingies."

"Right." DiNozzo eyed him worriedly from behind half-closed lids, trying to figure out what was going on. "Uh…we got a case, boss?"

"Just writing up the one where you did a swan dive, DiNozzo."

"Oh. Right." DiNozzo let his eyes close all the way. There didn't seem to be any further clues forthcoming. Then it dawned on him. "Uh, boss?"

"Yes, DiNozzo?"

"This isn't the way to my place."

"No, DiNozzo, it's not."

DiNozzo let all of one hundred and twenty seconds hang before mustering up the courage to ask, "where are we going?"

Gibbs chuckled. "Doc wasn't very happy about sending you home to an empty apartment, DiNozzo. I had to promise that I'd find you a baby-sitter. Just for the night."

DiNozzo froze. "Who?"

"Someone with impeccable medical credentials, DiNozzo."

"_Who?"_

Gibbs pulled the vehicle into the long and round driveway in front of a stately and elegant home. It could almost be described as a small mansion. The entranceway included two tall columns, freshly white-washed, with neatly trimmed bushes to either side. Small pink flowers sent over a delicate floral scent designed for nose-tickling. Across a short expanse of manicured grass grew three old and equally as elegant oaks, each offering its own version of shade for the weary traveler.

On the portico sat four Welsh Corgis, all staring at the car as Gibbs pulled up. One lifted its lip in a warning snarl.

"Dr. Mallard."

* * *

"We're late, McGee," Ziva announced, implying that McGee's driving skills were to blame.

"We are not," McGee defended himself. "Abby's appointment with the prosecutor is at four. It's only—"

"Three forty-five," Ziva cut in. "That is not sufficient time to locate the hotel, check in, and still return to the town hall."

"Not my fault," McGee pointed out. "There was that overturned tractor-trailer—"

"Had you permitted me to drive—"

"We'd never have gotten here in one piece—"

"Guys!" Abby broke in. "We're here! Give it a rest!" She surveyed the landscape with the air of someone determined to enjoy herself no matter what. "Looks just like I remember it. Look, Ziva, there's the General Store! They have these little candies in there, all different flavors; Gibbs really likes them. Remind me to get some for him. Tony, too, although he didn't like them as much. Tony didn't like much about Kings Point," she confided, as if Ziva and McGee weren't already aware of that piece of trivia. "That restaurant over there, they've got really great ribs, all greasy and drippy and really really good. Their corn on the cob isn't so great, but—"

"Where the hotel?" McGee broke in. "We have to check in before they give our rooms away."

"Down that street, I think—"

"We don't have time to check in," Ziva inserted.

"It's not far to the town hall—"

"We mustn't be late—"

"Guys!" Abby interrupted for the second time. "Look! _This_ is what's going to happen. McGee, you're going to drive to the town hall."

"But—"

"_Hush!"_ Abby held up a warning finger. "I repeat, McGee: you are going to take Ziva and me to the town hall for my appointment with the prosecutor. While Ziva and I are there, you are going to go to the hotel and check us in and drop off our luggage, then come back and pick us up. Got it?"

"But—"

"Got it?" Abby repeated, with a fiery glint in her eye.

McGee subsided. "Yes, Abby."

"Good." Abby turned on Ziva. "Any complaints?"

"Not a one, Abby." Ziva tried to battle down her smirk. She settled back in her seat, surveying the town of Kings Point. "Drive, McGee."

* * *

DiNozzo eyed the pack of Welsh Corgis with distaste. He couldn't keep track of them all: there was anywhere from four to eight of the little furry fiends, depending on how clear his vision was at the moment, and they all came with sharp white teeth. "You sure about this, boss?"

Gibbs shut the car door and advanced on the house. "You got a problem staying overnight with Ducky, DiNozzo?"

"It's not Ducky I'm worried about, boss. I'd hate to have to shoot his mother's dogs in self-defense."

All of the dogs perked up their overlarge ears at that. DiNozzo glared back at them. Did the damn things understand English? One growled threateningly under his breath.

"Let me relieve your mind," Gibbs replied. "I've got your gun, safe at headquarters. Figured it was best, since you were taking a nap. You won't be shooting anyone."

"Gee, thanks, boss."

Gibbs strode into the midst of the pack of canines, and they melted away. One almost held his ground, lifting a lip in a silent snarl.

"Back off, Tyson," Gibbs admonished.

The dog instantly recognized someone higher up in the pack order than himself and obeyed the command, allowing Gibbs to lead DiNozzo into the vestibule, trailing and sniffing at their heels. The entrance to Dr. Mallard's home matched that of the exterior, exuding the faint odor of a country manor of an English squire. Sunlight filtered in through tall windows edged with heavy brocaded curtains, and no fewer than three elegant figurines graced occasional tables with additional bric-a-brac dotting a shelf here and there.

There was something—or someone—missing. "Where's Ducky?"

"He'll be along later," Gibbs replied. "He's finishing up some work at headquarters. Not more than an hour, he said. Hello, Mrs. Mallard."

A slight, gray-haired lady appeared at the doorway. She glared at the pair of NCIS agents. "What are you doing in my house? Get out! Get out, the both of you!"

Gibbs chuckled, not cowed in the least. "Got Agent DiNozzo here, Mrs. Mallard. Ducky said it would be all right for him to spend the night. He was in the hospital."

"The hospital?" A vague fog passed over the elderly woman's features; they softened, and DiNozzo found it almost as disconcerting as the glare. Mrs. Mallard blinked. "Were you shot down over the Channel, dear boy?"

"Uh, no, ma'am." DiNozzo gulped. Gibbs was leaving him _here?_

"The coast of France, then." Mrs. Mallard wasn't taking no for an answer. "Come along, Neddy. Let's get you to bed. I'll have the maid bring you a nice cup of tea. That will set you to rights in a trice."

"'Neddy?'" DiNozzo shot a panic-stricken look at his boss. The Welsh Corgis, sensing fear, glowered at him with all the concern of a pack of hungry wolves in the dead of winter.

Mrs. Mallard didn't notice. "Come along, Neddy. You must tell me all about your adventures. My Donald never does, you see," she confided. "Nasty boy, goes off and leaves me all alone to cope by myself."

"I know the feeling," DiNozzo muttered under his breath, refusing to meet his boss's eyes.

"Where were you wounded? Nice? Rouen? Your arm or your leg?"

"Warehouse," DiNozzo told her, splitting the difference.

"I'm not certain I'm familiar with that part of France. Germany, perhaps?"

Gibbs changed the subject. "Ducky said to stash you upstairs, in the guest room; let you rest until he comes home. Stairs are right over there."

"I know where they are," DiNozzo grouched. "I've been here before." He glared at the canine pack.

He'd never realized that the staircase was filled with so many treads. How many was it supposed to have? Thirteen? Great; lucky thirteen. Just the right number for an old mansion with Ducky's dotty mother. What gods had he pissed off to end up here, head ready to split open like a watermelon at a family picnic? No gods—just Gibbs. Gibbs was telling him in a very Gibbs-like fashion that he was more than a little displeased that DiNozzo hadn't gone on the escort duty with Abby. That Anthony DiNozzo had been so careless as to throw himself down the stairs after the suspect to deliberately end up with concussion.

Right. He'd take his lumps, and hope that he didn't need a rabies shot before he was through. Damn. Wasn't he at the top of the stairs yet? And why hadn't they turned on the light in the hall? It was getting dark this time of year.

"The lights are on, DiNozzo." Gibbs hooked a strong hand underneath DiNozzo's arm.

_Crap, had he said that aloud?_

Gibbs chuckled. "Yup."

DiNozzo swallowed hard, his tongue getting as thick as the mist swirling in front of his eyes. "I…think…I need to sit down, boss."

"Keep walking, DiNozzo. That's an order." The hand tightened.

_I can do this. I can do this_. The bed bumped up against the back of his legs, and DiNozzo felt himself pushed down onto the soft cushion of the mattress. Vision had long ago exited the building, and DiNozzo simply sat, catching his breath, while someone pulled his shirt off.

Damn, the bed felt good. Having blood seep back into his brain now that he was lying down also felt good, and DiNozzo blinked. The guest bedroom in Ducky's house, he reasoned. Blue sky fresco painted across the ceiling, broken in the center by a soft light masquerading as a cloud. Four poster bed. Soft pillows all around—damn soft pillows, and they felt phenomenally good. He sank down into the depths, feeling Gibbs pull the covers up around his chin.

Gibbs chuckled. "Good night, DiNozzo."

"It's afternoon."

"Makes a difference?"

"Night, boss."

As he sank into a deep sleep almost better categorized as a coma, he heard Gibbs once more. "Yo, guys. You're on guard duty; hear me?"

A chorus of quiet woofs.

_Shit_.


	3. Where, oh where?

Abby led the way into the town hall, sheer memory guiding both she and Ziva to the prosecutor's office. The town hall of Kings Point was a large and squat brick building, devoid of anything remotely resembling attractiveness. It was built to be utilitarian, and it devoted itself to the task with heartrending thoroughness. The windows, sixteen to a row and four high, one for each square office and/or room, were uniform in size and shape. Not one was marred by anything so unique as an air conditioner or even a tacky sign to demonstrate that the inhabitant within had a warped sense of humor. All mirth had long ago been leached into the surrounding grunge.

The entrance shared the same lack of welcome. It declined to offer a covering over the front door to protect guests from the sun or rain. The interior was paved with linoleum in a no-nonsense shade of blech. Ziva was used to walking through a metal detector in almost every government building she visited; this one didn't bother with such niceties. Apparently no one worked up enough rancor in Kings Point to bother bringing in a handgun to shoot any of the officials forced to toil within. It was either that, or the realization on the part of the homicidal maniacs that death would be a welcome release for the hired help.

"Abby, the sign says that the prosecutor's office is on the third floor."

"Yeah, but it's wrong. They've just never updated it since they moved the office four years ago. Eight years, actually. That's when I was here with Tony."

"Ah. That explains the dust on the exterior of the sign."

Abby didn't bother with the elevator, instead leading Ziva up the four flights to the top floor. Ziva felt a modicum of relief; the elevator was giving off clear signals that it intended to take several unscheduled coffee breaks during any upward jaunt. A right turn, then a left, and they were at an office with an open door. The hand-lettered sign outside of the door informed them that they had arrived at the prosecutor's office.

Abby peered in. "Hello?"

A warm voice—the sole pleasantry in the entire building—floated out. "Come in. Looking for the prosecutor?"

"Yes. I'm Abby Sciutto, from NCIS. This is Officer Ziva David."

"Excellent! Glad you're here." A plump older woman with a welcoming smile rose from behind the desk, extending her hand. "I'm Alice Connors, Kings Point's prosecutor. Welcome to Kings Point."

"Thanks. It hasn't changed much," Abby observed.

A rueful expression crossed Ms. Connors's face. "Yes, well, it does tend to stay the same, doesn't it? The people around here seem to like it that way."

"You've changed," Abby said. "You weren't the prosecutor the last time I was here."

The prosecutor brightened. "True. I've been doing this job for almost three years now, which is a record for an outsider, I'm told. My predecessor lasted all of six months before being told to pack her bags, and the one before her only two."

"Why have you been able to remain?" Ziva couldn't help but ask.

Ms. Connors shrugged. "Beats me. Maybe I'm a better lawyer than the other pair. Maybe I just haven't run afoul of the town elders, which I suspect is a more realistic answer. The long time prosecutor before all of us held the job for some thirty five years, until he retired to a little cabin up on the mountain. He was one of the town elders. He had a lot of power, I'm told." She snorted. "Certainly more than I have, that's for sure." Then Ms. Connors smiled, and changed the subject. "Where are you staying? Did you get in all right?"

"Yup," Abby said before Ziva could respond. "We ran into an accident on the way here, so we were a little slow getting in. Special Agent McGee is checking us into the King's Hotel on the other side of town. Like, there's another place that we could stay?"

"You've got that right," Ms. Connors acknowledged. "It's not as though there's another hotel within twenty miles. This isn't a big tourist trap. On the other hand," she added, "Jimmy King started up a diner almost two years ago that isn't half bad. If you're not into the ribs at King's, you might want to try there."

"But the ribs at King's are great," Abby protested.

"Not as a steady diet," Ziva argued. "Thank you, Ms. Connors, for the recommendation. If we are here for any length of time, we will try it. How long do you think you will require Abby's services?"

"Good question." Ms. Connors got down to business. "I don't have an answer for you, Officer David. Frankly, this whole thing surprises me. Normally in a case like this, I request an affidavit from Ms. Sciutto attesting to the evidence in the case and present it as an exhibit. After all, she's testifying to establish the whereabouts of Lt. Dana Morris, who the defense states was at the scene that night and was involved. I don't understand why counsel for the defense is insisting that the evidence be presented for cross-examination. It's not as though they can challenge it."

Abby shrugged. "Maybe they're just trying to rattle you, keep you guessing."

Ms. Connors nodded. "That's probably it. If so, it's not working. This is a pretty straightforward case of assault and battery: Bart King went to the bakery where Josie Rose works and attacked both she and the boy she was seeing at the time, Darren Betterly. Darren spent a couple of months in rehab and just got out a few weeks ago. It took all this time for the case to come up for trial," she complained. "This may be a small town with very few cases that make it to a judge, but the court calendar still moves as slowly as anything I've seen any place else." She sighed. "It's a good thing I like the small town life, or I'd have followed my two predecessors back to the big bad city."

"This seems like a fairly simple case," Ziva observed. "Why is this going to trial? I thought in the American system, plea-bargaining was rather common."

"Ah, and there you have the saga of Kings Point, Officer David." Ms. Connors settled back in her chair. "You remember that I spoke of the town elders?"

"Just so."

Abby grinned wickedly. "There's a reason that this place is called _Kings _Point, Ziva."

"Oh?" Ziva got it. "Oh."

"Exactly." Ms. Connors folded her hands primly. "Bart King is the son of Bart King, Sr., mayor of Kings Point, and who has been the mayor for the last ten years. The King family—and there some three major families of them, not to mention all the various cousins—run this town. Most of the time it's okay. They keep the outright graft to a minimum and if the majority of the contracts are awarded to companies that are run by members of the King family? Well, most of the companies around here are run by members of the King family. Who's to say that the contracts aren't being awarded fairly? Certainly not Mayor King."

"Which brings us to the current case," Ziva nodded. "They believe that they can, as you say, beat the system?"

"It looks that way," Ms. Connors told her. "I've offered to plea-bargain more than once, and they've turned me down each time. Your subpoena is only the latest in a number of delaying tactics, I'm afraid."

"It won't be much of delay," Abby said. "I'll present my evidence, and you'll be done with our part of it. It's not like you can mess with DNA evidence. Lt. Morris's fresh DNA was all over our victim's body on the date in question. He was in the D.C. area, and there was no way he could have gotten here in time to be a witness to this assault. Cut and dried stuff. No leeway."

"We hope," Ms. Connors said gloomily. "Be prepared for the defense attorney—his name is Gerald _King_, by the way—to question everything you've ever done." Something caught her eye, and she frowned. "I don't suppose you brought a turtleneck shirt along with you?"

Abby fingered the spiderweb tattoo along her neck with a grin. "Nope. But I do have plenty of make up."

* * *

Anthony DiNozzo forced a spring into his step as he walked into the bullpen at NCIS headquarters. "Morning, boss," he greeted the man who, he had no doubt, had beaten him in by at least fifteen minutes and already had an overdose of caffeine on board.

"Morning, DiNozzo."

DiNozzo could feel Gibbs giving him the once over, keenly assessing whether or not DiNozzo ought to have come into work today, even for light duty. There was no question in DiNozzo's mind: he was going to be here. He'd managed to pass Ducky's little test this morning with the bright light thing that Ducky claimed not to be able to use any more, and he'd be damned if he'd spend another night pretending to be 'Neddy, shot down over the south of France' any longer. And those dogs—! Not one offered to bite his ankle—_thanks, Gibbs_—but each Welsh Corgi kept eyeballing him as though steak DiNozzo was on tonight's menu and that they were going to have to hustle if they wanted to wolf down their fair share.

Fortunately, DiNozzo could honestly say that he felt a lot better than twenty four hours ago. The headache had subsided to an occasional twinge that over the counter stuff could handle and the same could be said for that spot on his ribs where they'd connected with one or more steps on his trip down the warehouse stairs. Even the fog that had threatened to erase all the phone numbers that he'd collected over the past day was lifting, and he had no doubt that a strong dose of java would help immensely in removing the remnants of his little episode. He caught sight of a tall cup sitting on his desk, steam rising through the plastic covering; someone had recently donated a cup of high end caffeine to one Anthony DiNozzo. The smell of freshly brewed coffee hit his nose, proving that his sense of smell was intact.

It smelled like heaven.

The cup felt hot and comforting to his hand.

The molten liquid burned its way over his tongue and down his throat, there to spread throughout his entire synaptic system and provide just the jolt that he needed to finish turning back into Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo. He took another swig, just to prove that it was working, and lifted the cup in a salute to his team leader. "Thanks, boss."

Gibbs grunted, declining to admit that he was DiNozzo's benefactor. "Get to work, DiNozzo. We're already behind, with two agents on assignment and you lazing your butt off yesterday."

"On it, boss." DiNozzo leaned back in his chair and grinned. They weren't behind. Ziva and McGee would have finished their own reports on the warehouse take down, and Gibbs had all of yesterday to write up the summation. All Gibbs needed was DiNozzo's own report to send the whole thing on electronic wings to the JAG office where it would do someone by the name of Farland Jones a whole hell of a lot of good—_not_.

No, Gibbs would be cranky because he'd spent yesterday in front of his computer, catching up on whatever needed catching up instead of out in the fresh air where he liked to be. DiNozzo sipped once more at his cup, savoring the flood of fire. This would be a good day; DiNozzo could dawdle over his report and then attack his own mountain of leftover papers in his 'in' box. The director wouldn't assign them another case, not until the other half of the team got back from Kings Point.

DiNozzo shuddered. Dodged a bullet there, not going to Kings Point. Little hole in the wall place, filled with small town types who thought that they were something special. DiNozzo didn't mind small towns—well, actually, yes, he did—but it was the characters who thought that they were better than everyone else that tended to get to him. No, better to have McGee take his place. The man would do his job, would use the time 'surveying the place' so that he could use the information writing the next scene in 'The Great American Novel' that he was always on about, and come home. Ziva would look at it as simply another task that NCIS and Gibbs asked her to do, and she would do it well. She would complain about it incessantly, but as long as she complained to McGee and didn't make long distance calls to DiNozzo himself to voice her displeasure, DiNozzo was satisfied.

DiNozzo would do his paperwork, sit behind his desk, relax, drink more coffee and rest, secure in the knowledge that he'd gotten the better of the deal. Sure, he'd spent a day in a hospital and then a night in a Welsh Corgi-filled pit of hell. It was worth it to avoid returning to Kings Point. A good deal, one that he'd take any day of the week. Maybe he'd even call one of the nurses whose phone number he'd collected. Which one would he choose? Gretchen, Brandy, or Faith? And wasn't there one or two more? He'd need to wait until he got home to go through his things and figure out which one he'd try. DiNozzo grinned. Life was good.

Gibbs's cell phone rang, and his boss hauled the small electronic wonder out of his pocket. "Gibbs."

He stiffened. "Say again?"

DiNozzo sat up. That note in Gibbs's voice wasn't good.

"Sit tight, Ziva. We're on our way."

_That _chased any lingering malaise from Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo in a hurry. Aches and pains were forgotten. There was something serious in the air. "Boss?"

Gibbs turned from his cell. "Abby and McGee are missing."

* * *

"Go!" Ziva threw up her hands. "McGee, I do not wish to listen to you any longer. If you feel that you must stuff your face with food that will clog your arteries and induce a premature heart attack, then do so but do not expect me to join you."

"Frankly, Ziva, I don't." McGee was equally as frustrated with his fellow agent. "Abby and I will do just fine. Go do your morning run and meet us later in the hotel lobby. Abby and I are going to kill time before we have to meet with the prosecutor by tapping into the hotel wi-fi." He picked up the case containing his laptop, pointedly glaring at her running shoes.

Abby glared at them both. "Honestly, you two are as bad as an old married couple, the way you bicker. Next time I come to Kings Point, I swear I'm going to insist on coming here without an escort. I'll have more fun."

"This is not an excursion designed for 'fun', Abby. This is the job, and we are to escort—"

"Go!" McGee interrupted. "Just make sure that you shower before you catch up with us—"

"I am always clean, McGee. You, on the other hand—"

"Arggh!" Abby threw up her own hands. "Will…You…Get…Out…Of….Here?!!"

Ziva tossed one last dirty look at McGee and headed down the stairs toward the entrance to the King's Hotel.

Kings Point, whatever its shortcomings, Ziva thought, was still a nice place to be. She deliberately put her frustration with McGee behind her and concentrated on clearing her mind. The roads were wide and not overly crowded, and she took a moment to stretch before setting out on a leisurely jog. Three miles, she decided. That would be long enough to keep up her wind and work the muscles in her legs, yet not so far that it took her too long. No matter what McGee said, she still needed to be back in time to clean up and escort Abby to the court room in the Town Hall. Abby wouldn't be testifying until at least ten in the morning, but that didn't mean they could afford to be late.

Tony was wrong, she decided. His antipathy toward this town was unsupportable, and most likely occasioned by his dislike of non-urban surroundings. The air was clean and fresh and the people polite. The roads didn't have sidewalks, but didn't need them. There were few enough cars that jogging on the tarmac itself was no problem. The shops reminded her of some of the marketplaces back home, although here fast food consisted of greasy hamburgers instead of falafel. The biggest difference between D.C. and here, though was the noise—or lack thereof. This place was quiet. It was peaceful. That, she realized, was most likely why Tony disliked it. He thrived on noise and excitement. Ziva herself had gone through enough excitement in her life that she welcomed the respite. For herself, she enjoyed looking at the fields with various vegetables growing, and the apple orchard to the left made her want to return during harvest to sample the wares.

She gave her mind over to the non-thought of feet pounding the ground, covering the miles, honing her body as her job honed her mind. Ziva let all rational thought disappear, enjoying the feeling of the sun beating down on her dark hair and a tender breeze stealing away the sweat that broke out in response to her exertions.

It was over too soon. Ziva slowed as she approached the front lobby of the King's Hotel, and took a moment for some final stretching before heading back inside. She sniffed; she wouldn't admit it to her fellow agent, but McGee was correct. A shower after a run like that was mandatory.

It didn't take long. Ziva twisted her hair back into its usual ponytail, not bothering to dry it. The sun outside and time would dry it just as effectively, and it was getting late. Ziva would need to hurry to get to the lobby in time for McGee and she to take Abby to the courthouse. As it was, Ziva already anticipated listening to McGee whine about Ziva's failure to adhere to any sort of schedule. He would be wrong, of course, but the only way to prevent the man from his complaints would be to kill him, and that wasn't something that Ziva was prepared to do—yet.

She hurried down to the hotel lobby where she had arranged to meet them, and scanned the sitting area. Abby and McGee weren't there. Neither one was seated on any of the overstuffed furniture, heads buried in individual laptops, ignoring the time and trusting that Ziva would arrive to drag them out of their electronic stupor. Ziva looked again, convinced that she had somehow managed to overlook them, walking around the lobby so as to peer into every corner.

Not there.

This was puzzling. Ziva even remembered McGee commenting earlier about setting up an alarm on his laptop to remind them should the pair become overly immersed in whatever computer game they were playing. Perhaps he had told her to meet them somewhere other than the hotel lobby? Ziva distinctly remembered McGee choosing this location, but perhaps the man himself forgot. Ziva pulled out her cell phone and hit the speed dial.

The automated response went on, and Ziva waited impatiently for McGee's recorded voice to end. "McGee? Where are you? I am here in the hotel lobby, where you said to meet. If the two of you do not hurry, we will be late. Call me immediately."

This was irritating. Where could they be? Ziva put in a second call to Abby's phone, and got a similar response. The pair of them, Ziva decided with annoyance, needed a keeper. Unfortunately, _Ziva_ had been elected their keeper and right now she needed to find them before they ruined the reputation of NCIS by being late. Not only that, they would be late because they were playing games like children! Intolerable!

Perhaps they left without her? After all, Ziva had been a couple minutes late. No, the car remained in the hotel parking lot; Ziva could see it from here, still dusty from the long drive over country roads.

The restaurant down the block, then, dawdling over coffee. Abby too was a caffeine addict, though Ziva doubted that the forensic scientist would be able to obtain her favorite Caf-Pow drink here in Kings Point. Perhaps she had found a reasonable substitute, and was sampling the various—no. Ziva walked swiftly along the few blocks to an eatery with a sign declaring it to be a diner, a simple hole in the wall where simple and filling food could be obtained. Ziva entered and scanned the interior. The restaurant was not large, and a quick glance showed that the pair were not present.

Ziva accosted the woman assigned to welcoming new patrons. "I am looking for my friends," she explained. "A tall man, and a woman with black hair in a bun. Have you seen them? They would have been here earlier."

The woman thought. "Yes, they were here. They each had laptops with them?"

"That would be them."

The woman nodded. "They were here, but they left some time ago. At least twenty minutes. I overheard them saying something about waiting in the hotel lobby. Maybe you should try there?"

"Thank you." Ziva didn't bother telling her that she'd already tried the lobby without success.

This was most puzzling. No, it had moved beyond puzzling and was edging into alarm. Ziva tried McGee on his cell once more with no better luck. Where could they have gone? It was a short distance between the restaurant and the hotel, with little opportunity for muggers to take advantage of a pair of tourists. Something like that would have been noticed. Ziva wasn't overly impressed by McGee's martial arts skills, but the man was a trained NCIS agent and far from incompetent. He didn't match Ziva's own skills, but then, not many did. That was not bragging, it was a cold assessment of the facts.

The current fact was: Abby and McGee were missing.

* * *

"You could have left a bigger tip, McGee," Abby scolded. "Those waitresses work hard."

"Abby, the tip I left was plenty. It was a lot. The check was small."

"She made me iced coffee, special. That was extra."

"And the tip was large. That made up for it." McGee held the door open so that Abby could exit the small diner ahead of him.

"It's not as though you're paying for it. It goes on the expense account."

"Yes, I am. My taxes go to pay both of our salaries. And Tony's. And Gibbs, and everyone else who gets a paycheck from the government." McGee conscientiously scanned the street for any signs of malfeasants. It wasn't likely—the probability that someone would be looking to take down a forensics scientist whose information was merely a distraction for the prosecutor rather than any real contribution of the pursuit of justice was astronomically small—but the rule book said to scan the streets, and McGee played by the rules.

It was a major street for Kings Point, which meant that it had one lane going east and one going west, and that there was an entire traffic light at the intersection three blocks away. The lights methodically blinked their way through green and yellow and into red, all without a single vehicle approaching to take advantage of the traffic signal's careful metering of the traffic flow. The single pedestrian—on the other side of the street, thank you very much, and thus less likely to interfere with the NCIS Special Agent and the Forensics Scientist—disappeared into the corner hardware store, never to be seen by either ever again. The only sign of movement was the black and white police car that was moseying down the street in search of illegally parked cars.

"I can see why Tony didn't want to come back here," Abby mentioned. "Not his type of place."

Privately, McGee agreed with her. Publicly, too, and he said as much. "I'm just not sure why Gibbs was so set on Tony bringing you back here. I mean, it's not as though this was a particularly high risk detail; he could have had one of the security people do it and collect the overtime. I'll bet the cases are piling up."

"We'll have a big workload to get through when we get home," Abby nodded.

The police cruiser coasted to a stop, double-parking outside of some cars. Both policemen exited the vehicle, one glancing at the parking meter to ascertain whether or not more money could be extorted from the poor slob parked there. McGee eyed them curiously; they seemed to be headed in the direction of the two NCIS employees, walking between the parked cars to get to the sidewalk.

He was right. The pair, big and burly and each sporting more of a paunch around the middle than regulation, accosted them. "You the people from NCIS?"

"That's right." McGee identified himself. "Tim McGee, out of Washington. This is Abby Sciutto, Forensics. How can we help you gentlemen?"

The first one jerked his thumb toward the black and white. "Get in the squad," he grunted.

McGee blinked. "We have an appointment at the courthouse," he said. "Can you tell me what this is about?"

"We're taking you there."

This was odd. This was clearly not part of the usual process and, by the expression on her face, McGee gathered that this was a first for Abby. This apparently had not happened on her first excursion to Kings Point. McGee backpedaled. "There's a third person in our group. We're meeting her now," he added, hoping that they'd take the hint and let McGee drive the NCIS group to the courthouse himself. McGee really wanted to have his own means of transportation. Leaving travel up to the locals was not his idea of sensible; it would be altogether too easy for the NCIS agents to be forgotten. They would be stuck without their own car.

The two police officers looked at each other uncertainly, non-verbal messages flying between them. They came to a decision.

McGee relaxed. It seemed as though the pair was going to let them move on to meet Ziva and keep their appointment at the courthouse. Tony had been right to warn McGee about this place; they were certainly odd.

Relaxing was a mistake. One cop rammed his night stick into McGee's gut. The other grabbed Abby in a choke hold around the neck.

Abby cried out, but McGee was helpless to come to her aid. The cop—either through skill, training, or sheer luck—managed to jab McGee in the sweet spot. All of McGee's breathing apparatus shut down in protest. His oxygen-deprived knees went next, and the second cop caught him easily, dragging him toward the squad car.

"Cuff 'im," the first grunted, his hands full of screeching, kicking the lab rat. "We should cuff this one, too. Get in, bitch!" Fed up, he belted Abby across the face. She fell backward, into the squad car, and he shoved her all the way in, dumping McGee on top of her. "Don't move," he warned, pulling out his handgun. "Cooperate, or your boyfriend here gets his knee shot off."

"Don't listen, Abby!" McGee gasped, trying to pull air back into his tortured lungs. "Run!"

It wasn't happening. The squad car door slammed shut, trapping them inside, and the two Kings Point police drove off.


	4. Strung Up

Gibbs put the device on speaker phone so that DiNozzo could listen in. "Talk," he demanded. "What happened?"

Ziva's voice emerged from Gibbs's cell phone, small and tinny. "I don't know, Gibbs," she confessed. "McGee took her to breakfast at the local diner. The waitress there remembered them clearly, said that she served Abby an iced coffee. They left, and they have not returned to the hotel to meet me. There is no answer to either cell, and McGee's car is still in the parking lot."

"They get mugged?"

"There is no evidence of such, Tony. There were no witnesses that saw them on the street. I briefly examined the route between the diner and the hotel; I saw nothing to indicate that either Abby or McGee were accosted, nor were there any reports of accidents that they might have been involved in. It is as if they simply vanished."

"You contact the prosecutor's office, Ziva?"

"I did. She has not heard from them, either. She is less concerned; she does not believe that their presence or absence will substantially alter her case and still does not understand why the attorney for the defense insisted that Abby's evidence be presented in person."

Gibbs tightened his lips. "Why don't you have a talk with the defense attorney, Ziva?" he suggested. "Nose around; see what you can find out. DiNozzo and I will be there in a couple of hours."

"I will expect you shortly." Ziva rang off.

DiNozzo stared at Gibbs. His headache was threatening to make a return appearance in response to the crisis. "Boss? Kings Point is four hours away by car, and commercial airports avoid it like the plague. Gonna call in a few favors from somebody?"

"Nope." Gibbs jerked his thumb in the direction of the long staircase that led up to the Director's office. "He is."

Leon Vance, at the top of the stairs, looked down on DiNozzo behind his desk, his gaze unreadable.

* * *

This was more than puzzling; it was concerning—and it impacted directly on Ziva's own reputation. It was one thing to investigate a crime scene with colleagues. This was an escort detail, and a low risk one at that. To lose not only one's charge but her fellow agent was intolerable—and embarrassing. Ziva David would never be able to hold her head up if she returned to D.C. with her proverbial tail between her legs, minus a partner and her assignment. She would be twitted unmercifully to the point of going into hiding merely to escape the humiliation.

Unacceptable. She _must_ find them, for her reputation if nothing else. Making certain that pair was alive would be an added benefit, she added to herself grimly. Fortunately, Ziva David had been studying investigative techniques for several years in the company of Leroy Jethro Gibbs and had acquired a great deal of expertise. It was not the same as international espionage, though it had its similarities. Ziva would put those skills to work.

Fact: she had seen Abby and McGee off to their breakfast. Both had been in good spirits, with nothing to arouse Ziva's suspicions that anything was about to happen. Ziva contemplated the possibility that the two had chosen to go off together, never to return, in a romantic liaison—then shook her head. There was definitely an attraction between the two but up to this point it remained strictly platonic. Given the devotion each had toward their job and their superior, Ziva suspected that the relationship would remain platonic for some time to come. Ziva knew herself to be quite adept at reading people's emotions, and there was no chance that the pair was conducting an illicit romance at this time.

Fact: the pair had breakfasted in the diner a few blocks away. The waitress had said so. Ziva stopped herself on that one: not accurate. The waitress had _said_ that she had seen the pair. Was she being truthful?

Yes.

Yes, but…

Ziva retrieved the memory. Ziva had been too worried at the time to think about it, but the waitress had acted oddly. The woman had told the truth about seeing Abby and McGee—of that Ziva was certain—but there was something that was slightly _off_. The waitress recalled details, and clearly she had seen the pair. Few people would request an iced coffee on a cool and crisp morning such as this, and that lent weight to the waitress's assertion that she had seen Abby. If she had seen Abby, then she had seen McGee. That part of the story was correct.

However, the woman's eyes had darted to the left. At the time, Ziva had ascribed the action to the very natural tendency to look toward where she had assumed that Abby and McGee had sat: a small booth toward the back of the diner. What if Ziva was wrong? What if that glance had been a response to hiding something, a reaction that was difficult for the average person to restrain?

Progress; Ziva was narrowing down the time frame. She glanced automatically at her watch; it was currently a few minutes after ten, just time when court would be starting. Ziva had seen the pair off shortly before eight and had returned from her run before half past eight. A quick shower, no longer than ten minutes, and Ziva would have ready to join the pair before nine.

She considered; she would put the time line somewhere between eight fifteen and nine that the pair had gone missing. The waitress had served Abby iced coffee, therefore the two NCIS personnel had enjoyed breakfast, and Ziva would estimate that period of time at approximately half an hour. Ziva had come down to the hotel lobby by nine and had not seen them, therefore she would use that as the end to the target time period. Ziva had then proceeded to walk to the diner and could not have missed the pair. Nine AM would do.

Next, Ziva decided, she would examine the route that the two were likely to have taken. Though questioning the waitress was the more promising lead, Ziva suspected that she would need evidence in order to induce the woman to expound on her statement. This was a small town, and closely connected to each other. It would take a certain amount of leverage to induce the woman to talk, and Ziva determined to acquire that leverage before Gibbs arrived with Tony in tow.

That required the Mossad officer to return to the path that Abby and McGee would have taken. She wasted no time, heading back out into the crisp morning air.

The sidewalk was unremarkable. The diner was some two blocks away, the side of the road filled with small stores that were only now opening for business. One was a hardware store, another specializing in ladies' lingerie, and neither one would be able to help her. Of that, Ziva was certain. The used book store remained closed, and looked as though it would continue to remain in that condition for the foreseeable future. None of the store clerks would have been present when Abby and McGee walked by, and it was likely that the same could be said for the rest of the establishments along the way.

That left visual inspection. Ziva longed for her kit, left behind at NCIS headquarters, for the camera to take still photos for later inspection, for such simple items as a fingerprinting kit. Instead, she was left with mere eyesight alone.

It would have to suffice. Ziva let her gaze travel along the cement sidewalk, looking for anything that might give her a hint of what had gone on. The dust on the side held a few footprints, but none looked close to the size of either Abby or McGee. For the most part, the prints were the size of young children—no, wait. What was that?

It was a scuff mark and—more importantly—it was the size of Abby's shoe. It could have been any print from any woman walking along here, but somehow Ziva thought that it was not. In her favor: there were few pedestrians of either gender and the print was fresh. The edges had not yet had time to be weathered into bluntness, therefore the print was less than two hours old. That fit with the timeline.

Ziva continued to evaluate the scene. Cars were parked along the edge of the roadway, parking meters ticking away the pennies. She placed her hand on the hood of each one, noting the coolness of the engines beneath. Clearly these vehicles had not been moved in some time. One was even collecting debris behind its wheels.

Abby's scuff mark was positioned directly between two parked cars, suggesting that she had been dragged through the narrow opening. Ziva looked more closely; with a large amount of uncertainty, she could almost decipher that there were more scuffed prints, some of which could be attributed to McGee. There were others, too: large and heavy. Two men, then, perhaps three. It was difficult to tell with the prints overlaying each other. That circular indentation there—it could be a knee striking the dusty roadway.

Ziva looked further, hoping to get in a good look before an approaching vehicle came to obliterate her unofficial 'crime scene'. Tire tracks, with minimal blackening of the pavement, suggested that the vehicle in question had left swiftly but not precipitously. Ziva put it together: while walking back to the hotel, two or three men had accosted Abby and McGee and forced them into a car.

All right; she had the 'how'. What was the 'why'? Why had it occurred here in Kings Point? Why had it occurred to Abby and McGee? Was only one of them the target, and the other taken as a matter of convenience? Who had taken them?

Time for more deductive reasoning. The incident had occurred here in Kings Point. To Ziva's knowledge, Abby had been to Kings Point only once before in her life, and McGee never. If someone had wanted to abduct either one, it would have been easier to plan the event to occur in the D.C. area. Therefore, if one assumed that either Abby or McGee was a deliberate target, then Kings Point was part of the equation.

On to the next question: why _now?_ Why before the trial and not after? Was it pertinent? Was there something in Abby's forensic evidence that would strongly impact the outcome? The prosecutor had implied that there was not, and that coercing Abby to come to Kings Point was a colossal waste of time and taxpayers' money. Ziva frowned. Even if Abby was abducted, any reasonably competent forensics worker could reconstruct her notes and deliver the information to the judge and jury. It didn't make sense.

Perhaps the evidence was not the issue. If that was the case, then the target was either Abby or McGee, and then Ziva was right back to where she was in the first place: why Kings Point for the abduction and not D.C.?

She gritted her teeth. She needed more clues.

* * *

McGee's aftershave smelled really neat.

It was one of those very manly, very clean-smelling colognes, one that shrieked _bayberry_ and _hint of citrus_ and had a dashing young man on TV extolling its praises, a man whose only dates were with the gym where he could work on flexing his gluteus maximus.

It also had something else: an undercurrent of fear, and somehow Abby didn't think that the perfume-makers had intended for that particular odor to be included in the packaging. Not that she blamed him. It wasn't every day that NCIS personnel got themselves kidnapped by the police. It really wasn't part of the job description: not NCIS's, and not the police. Well, maybe the police, in third world countries where the police were in cahoots with evil politicians and made people 'disappear', but it wasn't supposed to be part of the job of any reasonably honest and upstanding cop.

Abby was getting a noseful of McGee's cologne, something that he'd applied just over an hour ago when he'd gotten ready for the morning. She was getting it because her head was buried in his chest, stuffed onto the stinking floor of the squad car where the two cops had shoved them after dragging them off of the street. That was another smell: garbage. Vomit. Dead cigarette smoke. Abby _wanted_ McGee's cologne, to push away the other smells that threatened to turn her stomach and upchuck all the iced coffee that the nice waitress at the diner had gotten for her, even though it was breakfast and most people got hot coffee instead of iced and _dammit_ she wanted Gibbs!

Where were they taking them? Tony had been _so_ right not to want to return to Kings Point. Right now she agreed with him one hundred and ten percent. Abby wanted out of here, out of the police car and out of Kings Point and back to D.C. where it was safe.

Maybe not. The end of the car ride would maybe mean the end of—

Nope. They were at the police station, the building with the town hall tacked onto the side. Abby and her two escorts had been there yesterday, meeting with Ms. Connors, the prosecutor. What the—?

Where ever they were going, the police were not taking them to court. Not to the prosecutor's office to wait. Big and Burly hauled McGee to his feet, helping him to steady himself with his wrists cuffed behind his back. "No hollerin'," Big and Burly warned, "or this knife goes between your ribs." He flicked a glance at Abby, and she bit her lip. "You, too. One scream, and your boyfriend here will end up bleeding his life away before any ambulance can get here."

No chance for escape. Not even any point in explaining that McGee wasn't her boyfriend and, given the circumstances, wasn't likely to be. Abby saw McGee frantically scanning the surroundings, looking for an opening. She could even see the thoughts churning in his head: _if I throw myself at these two goons, would Abby be able to run away to safety?_

The two cops saw it, too. "Don't try it, boy," Big and Burly said softly into McGee's ear. "She can't outrun a bullet."

Abby watched as McGee let his shoulders slump. Big and Burly was right. This was not the time for an escape attempt. Better to let the scene play out and watch for a better opportunity.

_Or_, Abby thought, _wait for Gibbs to find us. 'Cause he will._

The pair of cops marched Abby and McGee in through the side door. There was no one around, no one to see them enter except for a couple of gray squirrels more interested in stealing candy from the vending machine than either the nuts on the ground or the captives walking into the building. The side entrance led them to a corridor with layers of paint as least as thick as the cinder blocks that made up the wall, and their footsteps echoed hollowly. Down a dirty flight of stairs, and into an even more dingy and badly lit corridor with only a wanted poster from the fifties to break up the long expanse of despair; no one knew that they were here. Down yet another flight of stairs, footsteps echoing hollowly in the gloom, into the depths of the building.

Another smell hit her, one that Abby recognized immediately: formaldehyde. There was alcohol, too—isopropyl, if her nose did not deceive her. They were approaching an area that used chemicals, and it was a type of place that Abby knew very well…

Yup. A forensics lab. Not a big one, and not one with the toys that Abby was used to playing with, but a forensics lab all the same. There was a lab bench, and flasks, and a Bunsen burner—ye, gods! Was that mass spectrometer from the fifties? It looked like it. Probably hadn't been used since then, either.

The place was also almost as dingy as the corridor outside and certainly with as much dust. This was not a well-used lab; not that Abby was surprised. Small place like Kings Point got as much crime—big crime, she meant, not little petty shoplifting stuff—in three years as NCIS did in half an hour. There was a computer in the corner with a decent sized screen, one that looked like it was used half the time for searching fingerprint databases and the other half for on line role playing games and the other half for internet porn. Sure, that added up to three halves, but Abby knew the type of lab rat that used this type of forensics lab, and those types tended to have difficulty with math.

There was one thing out of place. Not a thing; no, it was a person. It was a person who used the number 'five' to describe her age, and Abby wasn't talking the singleton part. No, this woman was the type who gave 'fifty' a bad rap: overweight and not particularly interested in changing that status as long as she had better things to do and right now it appeared that Abby and McGee were part of those 'better things'. Short hair with a bad dye job from a bottle and a sink, and clothes that came straight from the local store that saved money by not keeping up with Fashion Avenue; this was the person who had ordered Abby and McGee to be brought before her.

She looked Abby up and down, and ignored McGee. Abby felt a cold dagger seep inside her; this had something to do with her. This was not the time to show weakness, and Abby lifted her chin.

"You Abigail Sciutto?" The voice was gravelly, laced with overtime work hours and whiskey for the long haul. It was a voice that went well with the worn-out package.

Abby pushed. "You kidnap people off of the street without knowing who they are?"

"We're Federal agents," McGee said calmly from behind her. "You are in very big trouble. Let us go now, and I'll see what I can do—"

"Shut up." The woman cut him off, and stalked up to Abby. "Do you know who I am?"

"No."

She pushed her face into Abby's. "Does the name 'Jason King' ring a bell?"

Abby had worked on thousands of cases, and the names that had crossed her desk numbered in the millions, possibly even trillions. The name she had been presented with was not particularly unique. She had probably worked on a minimum of fifty cases involving a 'Jason King', all of whom owned different DNA.

Abby, however, had come to Kings Point and it was her second trip here. The first had been to testify on behalf of Seaman First Class Ashton Downey, to convince the court that he could not serve as an alibi for the suspect in a murder in Kings Point because at the time he was busy raping Lieutenant Mary Jo Ramirez on board the USS Determination while it was moored at the Newport Naval Base. Seaman Downey was unavailable to give his own testimony, Abby recalled, because he was currently serving ten to twenty. Abby had come to Kings Point, accompanied by Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo and Special Agent Kate Todd, and made that point abundantly clear. The trial had gone on swiftly and convicted the suspect of murder.

The convicted suspect was Jason King.

Coming back to Kings Point had wakened those memories several days ago, and Abby remembered the DNA results that had convicted Downey and meandered to a murder conviction for one Jason King. Now other memories came back: the woman standing before Abby had also been in the courtroom, her face drawn and angry, lips compressed into a diamond hard line. Family? Likely; more than half of the population of Kings Point was related in some fashion.

Abby was saved from giving an answer by the woman herself. "It was your testimony that put my son in jail."

That answered the question of who the woman was: Jason King's mother. The lips were still angry, just as they had been several years ago. Abby hadn't paid much attention to either the case or to the suspect, but this woman's face stood out. She had stared at Abby throughout her entire testimony. Abby had concentrated on answering the questions put to her, trying to ignore the glare.

She couldn't ignore the glare now. "I just told the facts. And the fact was, Downey's DNA showed that he couldn't possibly have been with your son when the murder was committed. He couldn't have been the alibi."

"My son didn't murder no one."

"That's not what the jury decided," McGee put in. Abby glanced at him in surprise; McGee sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Probably did; Abby wouldn't put it past her fellow geek to have looked up the details of the case upon learning that he would be taking Tony's place as escort. Actually, Abby wouldn't have been surprised to learn that McGee had done the research even earlier, trying to find a chink that would allow him to twit DiNozzo in return for all the practical jokes that Tony loved to play. Not important at the moment. What was important was that McGee knew what was going on. "The jury took just under three hours to convict Jason King of the second degree murder of Mariah Lovage."

Mrs. King turned to face McGee. "The jury was wrong. They all were. My son is no killer!"

"That's not what the evidence said," McGee pointed out calmly.

_McGee! You're getting her even more angry! Stop pulling her attention to you, when your hands are cuffed behind you and you can't defend yourself!_

_Oh. Stop trying to protect me from her. It won't work._

"The evidence was wrong!" Mrs. King told him furiously. She threw out an arm and pointed. "And _she's_ going to prove it!"

Abby took a deep breath. "I can't prove something that isn't true."

Mrs. King focused back onto Abby. "You'd better hope that you can, missy."

Abby froze. "What do you mean?"

This time the woman ignored her. "Get the rope," she told the two cops. "String him up."

"What are you doing?" Abby protested. She started forward, only to end up facing a handgun that Mrs. King was pointing at her.

"Sit down."

"But—"

"I'll shoot him right now," Mrs. King threatened.

Abby sat.

The two cops continued their work. One tossed a heavy rope over one of the rafters across the ceiling, letting it dangle some eight feet off of the concrete floor. Another dragged a stool to a position just below the end of the rope. One of the cops took hold of McGee by the arm. "Get up on the stool."

"But—"

"You don't want to make her mad," the cop told him, "and you don't want to end up getting pounded. Get up on the stool and stand there."

McGee got. It was a tall step, the stool seat some two feet above the floor, and the cop steadied him as he clambered up on top of the stool without the benefit of his arms to balance himself. The other cop pulled a ladder over so that he could reach McGee's eye level. He fashioned a hangman's noose out of the end of the rope and draped it around McGee's neck, not meeting the NCIS agent's eyes.

McGee licked his lips nervously. "What are you doing?"

Neither one answered. Instead, the other one tied off the end of the rope to a lab bench solidly riveted into the concrete floor, pulling the rope just taut enough so that McGee couldn't bend down without tightening the noose enough to cut off his air. With his wrists still cuffed behind his back, Timothy McGee was in a precarious position. All it would take would be for someone to kick the stool out from underneath his feet, and McGee would be dead within minutes, strangled like a victim of Old West vigilante justice.

Mrs. King examined the set up and approved. She turned to Abby. "Your turn. Get to work, missy."

"What do you want?" Abby fought to keep the quiver out of her voice.

"It's pretty simple, actually." Mrs. King folded her arms. "It was your forensic testimony that got my son into this. You're going to come up with the evidence that gets him out."

"Look, it's not that easy," Abby protested. "I don't tell the evidence where to go. I just do the tests, and let the truth tell the story. I can't make the evidence say something, just because you want it to. You can't argue with scientific fact."

Mrs. King was implacable. "You'd better learn how, real fast," she said. "My son was just moved to Intensive Care after being knifed in a fight in that jail." She leaned over, to make her point crystal clear. She lowered her voice. "He dies, so does your friend there. I'll kick that stool out from underneath his feet as soon the doctors tell me that my son died at the hands of the law as an innocent man. So you'd better get working on it, missy. You free him, and your friend goes free as well."


	5. Out for Blood

"This may be the reason," Alice Connors said to Ziva. "It's the only thing that makes sense: the defense can delay the progression of the trial on the grounds that forensics evidence is not available. It's not much, but the longer they can drag this out, the more hope they have to cut a deal that they like better than what I've offered so far. It will get too expensive for the State to prosecute Bart King for a simple assault case. If the judge is sympathetic—and he may be—then Bart Jr. will get off with probation." She glanced back at the heavy oak door that led to the interior of the court room. "Keep me posted," she told the NCIS agent. "This is just the preliminary stuff; I gave my opening statement, the defense gave his, now it's time for another long break. 'The wheels of justice grind slowly'," Connors quoted, "and around here that means slower than usual. I had originally planned for Ms. Sciutto to give testimony this afternoon and get it over with. Now? Who knows?"

"Who are the people who would gain from preventing Abby from testifying?" Ziva asked. "Clearly, the suspect. What about his family? Would they be likely to take action?"

Connors shrugged. "Maybe. Bart, Sr. is the mayor and used to getting his own way. Lizzy, too; that's the mother. Bart, Jr. graduated from high school three years ago and flunked out of college. Sort of a wild kid, and this trial just proves it. I fully expect to convict within three days, and it will take that long because Defense has been throwing up all sorts of silly roadblocks such as demanding that Ms. Sciutto testify in person." She looked at Ziva. "How far did you get with the police, with Chief Ethan?"

"Ethan King?" Ziva made a face. "He declined to assist in the search, telling me that I needed to wait twenty four hours." She snorted. "He had the nerve to suggest that Abby and McGee had eloped to Las Vegas."

"Could they? Elope, I mean?"

"Hah. Not likely. If Abby were to get married, she would want the most outrageous ceremony with white and black roses, several hundred guests, and Gibbs to give her away. No," and Ziva shook her head, "that would be the most important thing to Abby, that Gibbs give her away. I cannot see her running off for a hasty marriage. McGee, either," she added thoughtfully. "The man rarely does things on the spur of the moment, certainly not of that ilk." She paused, thinking. "I believe it is time to discuss this matter with Mayor and Mrs. King. Perhaps they can shed some light on Abby's and McGee's disappearance."

"Then here's your chance. There they are, right now." Connors pointed out a large man and his tall wife, both earnestly talking with the defense attorney, all three gesticulating but keeping their voices down.

Ziva took a moment to make her initial assessment. The man was not especially tall, not when she compared him to her teammates, but what he lacked in height he made up for in girth. Ziva strongly suspected that the man outweighed any two of them put together, and all of it in solid fat. Balding, too, with hair plugs that were inexpertly placed, and the whole package stuffed into a suit that only came out on Sundays and special occasions. This was not a man who had devoted himself to the halls of higher learning, but it did not mean that he was stupid. Ziva caught sight of the gestures that suggested that Mayor Bart King, Sr. of Kings Point had gained his post by being more clever than any of his kin.

Mrs. King—Lizzy was what Ms. Connors had called her—was equally as irate. No, perhaps irate was the wrong word. Ziva couldn't quite pinpoint the flood of emotions being played out in front of her. Tall and thin was the operative description, also dressed in Sunday finery that included a sage green suit determined to leach any color out of the woman's features. An orange scarf tried to put the color back, and failed miserably.

Ziva presented herself and her identification. "Mayor King? Mrs. King? Ziva David, NCIS."

Mayor Bart King went on the offensive. "We know who you are. It's all over town."

"Then you know why I am here. What can you tell me?"

"I can tell you that you're not welcome," Mayor King replied. "I can tell you that you're not wanted, that you and your friends can pack their bags and get out of town. This was a nice town before you and your pack of clowns came along."

"I'm afraid that would be difficult, since my 'friends' have disappeared. Kidnapping two Federal agents is a serious offense, Mayor King. I repeat: what can you tell me?"

"Are you accusing me of a crime? I'll have your badge—"

"Do not threaten me—"

"Don't answer any more questions, Bart," the defense attorney broke in. "Agent David, I'm advising my clients to avoid you until after this trial is over. This interview is ended."

"This is on an unrelated matter," Ziva insisted. "This is about the disappearance of two Federal agents."

"Who happen to be here on assignment to testify in the trial of the State v. Bart King, Jr.," the attorney said calmly. "Not buying it, Agent David. Get away from my clients, or I'll file a formal protest. This case is going to be tried without your interference."

"But—"

"C'mon, Bart." The defense attorney drew the mayor and his wife away, not letting either say a single word to Ziva. Under the attorney's eye, the three got into a large black sedan and drove off.

The wife looked as though she had plenty to say, Ziva thought. She looked as though she was ready to explode.

More and more puzzling. Did the mayor have something to do with Abby and McGee's disappearance? It was possible, but it didn't make any sense. Why had the defense called Abby out here in the first place? As a delaying tactic for the trial, it was weak at best. Abby had arrived and, had she not vanished, would have given her testimony and been done with the task within a single day.

That suggested that there was another motive. Why had Mayor Bart King, Sr. insisted on her presence? Ziva wished heartily that McGee had not been kidnapped. She would be more than happy to turn to him and request a computer search on Bart King, Sr., and his wife as well, to see what emerged. What secrets did the man hold? McGee would have found it easy to determine, even here in the tiny town. McGee and his computer could access some of the most useful databases, and would have had her answer in minutes.

Instead, all she had to go on was innuendo backed up by gut instinct and right now her instincts were screaming that the mayor and his wife were involved.

Perhaps it was time for a field trip to the mayor's home. That would be an excellent way to spend the remaining time until Gibbs and DiNozzo arrived. Ziva headed back toward the hotel to the car.

* * *

_How much longer?_

DiNozzo gritted his teeth. It was fast, but not the most comfortable that he'd ever flown. Director Vance had called in a small favor and gotten a military chopper assigned to take DiNozzo and his boss to Kings Point, and now the rotors overhead were beating a staccato rhythm that had set up its own battlefield inside of DiNozzo's head.

Not that he'd tell Gibbs that. Nope, as far as the world was concerned, one Anthony DiNozzo was in the peak of condition, despite lying on a hospital bed just two days ago. Staying behind when Abby was missing was not going to happen, no matter what anybody said. McGee, too; not that DiNozzo would admit to that, either. Hey, the man was a team member. Couldn't let the world think that they didn't stick together. Besides, who'd get stuck running computer searches if McGee wasn't around? Who could he get to be the butt of all the practical jokes? DiNozzo wasn't about to start playing all of them on Ziva, not when she could kill him with a single mis-timed blow. And Gibbs? DiNozzo snorted to himself. Not in this lifetime. The man was sitting in the seat next to DiNozzo, his eyes closed, catching forty winks while he could. DiNozzo envied Gibbs that; the ex-Marine had learned how to go to sleep in under thirty seconds flat when and where he needed to. No bag with him, no kit—Gibbs didn't expect to be in Kings Point long enough to need something like that. If he was, then he was going to be working full on with no time for such niceties as shaving.

The fastest way to get to Kings Point was by chopper, and that was what they were doing. There was a small airport some forty miles away, but it would have required a flight with two connections before they even got to that point, and driving was just as bad. Vance's favor involved some flight time for a trainee and his instructor, just to make the trip look good on paper, and the helicopter was planning on setting down in the parking lot behind the Town Hall. It cut down travel time by some three hours.

Minutes counted, in situations like these. Ziva had let them know that the locals were sticking to the twenty four hour rule. DiNozzo snorted again. There was something afoot. Abby and McGee wouldn't just disappear, not with testimony waiting. He closed his eyes, willing the chopper to fly faster and end the torture.

The town came into view. The pilot and co-pilot exchanged a brief verbal tutoring session, waking the two NCIS agents up, and both Gibbs and DiNozzo leaned forward to get a better look at their destination. It was small—DiNozzo knew that—and it appeared unchanged from DiNozzo's previous excursion. Still had the surfeit of little white houses with picket fences, and DiNozzo could just bet that each one came with a hound for hunting in the pristine forests beyond, which meant that each home came equipped with one or more hunting rifles that, in a pinch, could be used for defending oneself against the government varmints that came collecting for taxes and whatever else they could find. _Oh, joy_.

DiNozzo dry-swallowed something bitter against the pounding in his head, forgetting the taste as the chopper bounced to a landing in the empty back parking lot of the municipal building complex. The instructor muttered something minimally encouraging under his breath that was meant to be heard by the pilot-trainee, something along the lines of 'any landing you can walk away from is a good one'. Fine for them; after that jolt, DiNozzo wasn't going to swear that he could walk.

Running, however, was going to do just fine. DiNozzo grabbed his crime scene kit and hustled himself to catch up to Gibbs, striding across the parking lot, ignoring the stares of the cops and town hall workers who had come out to see what the heck had just landed in their back yard.

One in particular came out to meet them, his gait just enough unhurried to tell DiNozzo several things: one, the guy was worried about this meeting and, two, he was trying not to show it. Hmm: there was a 'three'. There was a slight air of belligerence, something along the lines of 'locals versus feds'. Okay, that pegged this guy and DiNozzo's brain went into overtime trying to remember if he'd seen him before.

Yup; DiNozzo remembered the name mere seconds before the formal introduction: Chief of Police Ethan King. The last name wasn't hard to remember, because everyone and their mother's uncle had the patronymic of King. DiNozzo mentally patted himself on the back for remembering the first name.

"Special Agent Gibbs." Gibbs flashed his badge with one hand; the other was occupied with holding a bag containing items commonly used in the processing of a crime scene. DiNozzo knew what was in that bag, because his own kit held similar items. Gibbs stuck the badge away. "I understand that a couple of my people are missing. What can you tell me?"

Ethan King raised his eyebrows in a manner that DiNozzo would have found irritating with very little effort. "Missing?" he drawled. "I don't recall anyone missing in these parts. 'Cepting maybe Tommy King's two year old. I swear, that kid wanders off into the bush on a weekly basis."

Implying that Gibbs's people had as much upstairs as a two year old? DiNozzo kept the professional smile frozen and let his boss do the talking.

Gibbs kept his temper. "Not the way I see it, Chief. From my point of view, I've got a very valuable Forensics scientist and a well-respected agent missing, both of whom have access to sensitive government databases." He jerked his thumb toward the ostentatious Navy chopper that was revving up in preparation for the return flight. "Somebody back in Washington thought that it was important enough to requisition a bit of military support."

Well, yes, that was true. _Gibbs_, back in Washington, had been firmly of that opinion. Though why someone would kidnap either Abby or McGee merely to be able to go through a few billion fingerprint records was beyond DiNozzo. Still, it sounded good.

Ethan King's own smirk faltered just a bit. Clearly the chief of police hadn't thought that the NCIS agents had warranted this amount of effort on the part of the Feds, and he was finding out that he was mistaken. The warning had come on the wings of a military chopper, and that suggested that a serious error in judgment had occurred. He backpedaled. "They could've gone off together…"

Gibbs let the silence hang for just long enough to tell Chief Ethan just what he thought of that idea. "They're hoofing it to the next town over?" The sarcasm dripped slower than cold molasses. He turned to DiNozzo and delegated. "They'd need a car. Go check out the car rental over there; see if anybody rented a car." He turned back to the police chief. "You got more than one car rental place around here?"

"Uh, no," Chief Ethan stammered before he could think up a decent way to confuse the issue. He flushed. "That's the only one."

"Good. We can rule that out, as soon as Special Agent DiNozzo investigates that possibility." There was no emphasis on the word 'investigates', yet it cut like a knife. "I'm going to need to see your files on the Bart King case, chief. My people were here to testify, and that's the logical place to start." More quiet words, and more reproof that the locals simply hadn't bothered to pay attention to what was going on around them.

DiNozzo put in his two cents. "I'll be back in ten minutes." He turned to go, and was interrupted by the sound of Gibbs's cell. He paused.

Gibbs answered it. "Gibbs."

DiNozzo could hear only one half of the conversation, but didn't need the other half to figure out what was being said.

"McGee's laptop?"

"Just the case, and not the computer. Where?"

"Got it. Stay put, Officer David." Gibbs was being formal in front of the locals. "We'll be there as soon as we pick up transportation. Don't let anyone disturb the scene where my people were hijacked. At least, not any more than it already has been." He glanced at DiNozzo. "Pick up a rental while you talk to the car people. Something that can travel fast over rough terrain."

"Boss?"

"A lead. Officer David found Special Agent McGee's laptop case. Empty," Gibbs added pointedly, for Chief of Police King's benefit. "Somebody apparently wants the classified intel that's on McGee's laptop."

Which, since there wasn't a heck of a lot of intel on the thing, made about as much sense as Abby and McGee getting themselves kidnapped in the middle of nowhere, but DiNozzo didn't let that bother him. After all: this was Kings Point.

* * *

It was automatic: the box of forensic evidence came in and Abby looked for the chain of evidence signature sheet that ought to have accompanied it. It was missing, and Abby said so.

All three Kings Point residents looked at her as though she was crazy.

"I hope that this isn't a silly delaying tactic, missy," Mrs. King warned. "It's not in your boy's best interest. He gets tired, he's going to fall off that stool and hang himself."

Abby set her jaw. "This isn't a delaying tactic. If I don't sign the chain of evidence, the judge will throw out all of my findings. You lose everything."

"Better listen to her," McGee said from his perch on top of the stool, the noose lying limply around his neck. He swallowed, feeling the individual fibers of the synthetic hemp rub against his skin. "You say that your son is innocent. Abby won't be able to prove it if the evidence is dismissed."

The two cops looked at each other uncertainly. One cleared his throat. "He's right, Aunt Judy."

Mrs. King glared, spreading her vitriol over everyone there including her two police officer nephews. "All right. Get the damn paper. Where is it?"

The cop shifted his weight. "Penny should have brought it with her. I'll call her, and tell her." He pulled his cell phone, cursing as the call wouldn't go through the heavy cinderblock walls. He walked over toward the door, trying for something less than a dead zone. "Penny? Yeah, it's me. Listen, we need the chain of evidence record." Pause. "Yeah, I know. But it's gotta get done. Stuff it down your dress or something, and make like you need a bathroom break, okay?" He hung up, muttering under his breath.

"She bringing it?" Mrs. King asked impatiently.

"It'll be on its way in a little bit. Penny just took a break; she's gotta wait a few minutes so it doesn't look suspicious."

Mrs. King turned to Abby. "Start."

Abby stood her ground. "Not until I have the evidence sheet. If I open it before then, the evidence is compromised, and then it—"

"Your friend is standing on that stool, and you can sign that damn paper when it gets here. How long do you think he can stand without moving?"

Abby swallowed hard. "Okay." Biting her lip, she sliced into the yellow tape on the box that warned people that the contents were protected by law.

There wasn't much inside. There was the casebook that contained all the reports from the Kings Point police investigation, the papers yellowing from age. There were the victim's clothes, the blood dark along the rip that the knife had made so many years ago. The blood was no longer hard and crusted; time had degraded the components into their many molecules, and the cloth lay limp inside its plastic covers. Abby held up one of the papers, and McGee could see the over-sized conclusion at the bottom of the paper stating that the blood belonged to the victim. No help there; it neither proved nor disproved Mrs. King's son's guilt.

Next Abby pulled out the murder weapon: a long hunting knife with a hard plastic handle. It too bore traces of the victim's blood, though McGee wondered if some of the smudge marks on the handle would turn out to be the perpetrator's own fingerprints. He offered his thought aloud.

"Maybe." Abby rummaged in the box. "Hah. They looked for the same thing. Here's the sheet of results. They pulled three prints off of the handle, and a bunch more smudges. Two prints belonged to the vic, and the third to Jason King."

Mrs. King looked like a thundercloud. "That's a lie," she announced fiercely. "My son was nowhere near when Mariah got herself killed."

Abby put the papers aside, pulling out more of the evidence. Some of it was immediately recognizable: a cell phone, a ten year old model that looked big and bulky compared to the sleek versions currently on sale at the local store. There was a pink and purple wallet that Abby flipped open to display a driver's license of the victim, a young woman in the prime of life, a big smile to go with bouncing blonde hair. Looking down on the tiny picture from his perch, McGee felt a sense of regret; the victim had been gone for several years. _What a waste_. There were photos as well: pictures of the crime scene with the victim sprawled on the ground. It looked like autumn, McGee thought, craning his neck, with the leaves in a colorful yellow and red collage that the body lay upon. He guessed that the body was cold by the time someone found it, because the limbs had that set look that shouted _rigor mortis_ to anyone with a smidgeon of forensics knowledge. The blood, pooled to either side of her chest, was rust brown. Clearly the victim had lain there for hours before being discovered.

McGee tried to read from a distance what Abby was seeing in the photos: the clothes were disheveled, leaving the body naked from the waist down. He cringed; that violation had not been done post-mortem. The girl had been brutally raped before being murdered. A crime of passion? Perhaps; the report that NCIS had compiled had told him that the suspect, Jason King, had been seeing the victim. A cast aside suitor could easily explain the circumstances.

Abby was thinking the same thing. She rummaged further in the evidence box. "They took specimens," she announced, "but they never did DNA testing."

"Do it now," Judy King ordered.

Abby shook her head. "Can't. They didn't keep any specimens."

"Why not?" Outraged.

Abby glared back. "You're asking me? Lady, you dragged me into this. I'm just looking at the evidence, like you told me to."

Abby carefully avoided looking in his direction, McGee noted. Afraid to? Good possibility; Abby wouldn't want to draw any attention to McGee for fear that the woman would knock the stool out from underneath him in a fit of rage. Wouldn't that be fun? McGee swallowed hard, feeling the edges of the stool beneath the hard leather soles of his shoes. The stool felt extraordinarily narrow at the moment, although McGee knew intellectually that it was wide enough to accommodate his backside.

This was not helping. He could stand here like a statue ready to be pulled down from its pedestal, or he could participate in the action and hopefully move toward getting himself and Abby out of this mess. McGee cleared his throat. "Show me the photos," he requested.

Judy King stared at him. "Why? You aren't a forensics guy."

McGee kept his temper. "Because I am a trained investigator. If I'm going to stand here waiting to get hung, I might as well be useful." _And because if I just stand here doing nothing, waiting for you to knock this stool out from under me, I might just jump and save us both the trouble._

Mrs. King considered for a long moment. "Let him see. Not you," she told Abby, who had started over toward her fellow NCIS agent. "You get to work on the evidence. Do something scientific." It wasn't a joke, and Mrs. King had absolutely no humor about her. She was serious.

Abby bit her lip, allowing one of the cops to take the photos from her hand. He showed it to McGee.

McGee tried to approach it with the same equanimity that he would bring to any other crime scene. Step one: take in the entire photo. It had been well done, the focus crisp and clear, delineating every aspect of the horrific subject. On closer inspection the victim still appeared to be in her early twenties, consistent with the info on her driver's license. Blonde hair, tousled and tossed over her face. Short, petite; McGee estimated her weight at something around one hundred ten, maybe a little bit less. Probably not significant to the investigation. She had worn jeans with something sparkly along the side of the leg, the sparkle covered along the thigh by blood so that it didn't shine in the flash. Those jeans had been pulled down to her knees. McGee could picture in his mind's eye what had happened so many years ago: Mariah Lovage had gone behind the barn to snitch a cigarette—the coroner's report had noted no early signs of emphysema in her lungs but did report faint nicotine stains on her fingertips—and had been confronted by the killer. They had likely spoken, perhaps argued, and the killer had overpowered her. He had pulled down her jeans, further tangling her legs in the clothing so that Ms. Lovage couldn't run away, and then assaulted her. It was an all too common crime, carried out in an all too common fashion. If he cared to, McGee could recite statistics as to how often this particular scenario occurred in any given city across the nation. Girl meets boy. They argue; they fight. He becomes enraged, and the assault takes place. Girl, if she's lucky, lives through the experience.

Mariah Lovage hadn't been lucky.

McGee forced himself to examine the photo critically, quartering it for a systematic approach. Upper left: the broad side of the barn. The wood was old and in need of a new coat of paint. The old coat was peeling, and the photo showed a few of those peels had already parted ways with the wood and instead lay languishing on the dirt below. There were footprints in that area of the photo, the edges blurred and covered over by multiples. Clearly the pair had struggled. Mariah had not gone down tamely.

Upper right of the photo: more barn wall, and more footprints. A shrub with dying red leaves had had several branches broken from the fight, with several twigs lying under the body. Under the body meant that the twigs had been broken off before the body had landed on the ground, and the photo showed the ends of the twigs to be fresh and white. That suggested that the twigs had indeed been broken during the assault itself. If they had been broken even a few days earlier, the ends would have been dull and browned.

McGee continued the circular perusal of the photo. The lower right showed most of the struggle. There were multiple footprints. Most of them overlapped, making it difficult to determine where one began and another one ended, but here and there were clear prints. Two belonged to the victim: small, probably a size six woman's shoe. McGee struggled to remember if the report he'd seen back home said anything about shoe size, and decided that it probably hadn't. The NCIS report was concerned with the events leading to the conviction of Seaman Downey rather than a small town crime with no other connection to the armed forces beyond an allegation that the aforementioned seaman was supposed to provide an alibi.

The fourth quarter provided another footprint outlined in blood. The killer had obviously stepped in the blood after stabbing the victim. McGee tried to read the scene, thinking grimly to himself that Gibbs would have already read and been out hunting the man down by the time McGee got to this quarter of a single photo. The suspect—convict, McGee corrected himself—the convict had argued with Ms. Lovage over the loss of affection. He had probably insisted on a reconciliation, and forced himself onto the victim when she continued to refuse him. What had happened next? Perhaps she'd slapped Jason King, sending him over the edge. Had there been words? _"If I can't have you, then nobody can!"_ It was trite, but just because it was trite didn't mean that it hadn't happened. King had pulled a knife, stabbed the victim, and then dropped it from his hand in horror. Finally coming to himself, he would have run. Yes, there was another footprint aimed in the opposite direction, suggesting that the attacker had fled into the woods.

None of which helped anyone. Everything continued to prove the conviction, that Jason King had killed Mariah Lovage in a fit of jealous rage. McGee stared at the shoe print, estimating that Jason King was as large as the pair of rogue cops over in the corner of the old forensics lab that had dragged the NCIS agents into this mess at the behest of Jason King's mother. It was hard to tell, since no one had bothered to place any sort of measuring ruler next to the footprint in the photo for comparison. McGee almost sniffed in disdain, then thought better of it. Those errors could very well lead to one Timothy McGee's picture ending up on the Wall along with too many other pictures of fallen agents.

"I'm not liking this," Abby announced suddenly.

McGee looked up. He knew that note in the lab rat's voice. He'd heard that tone before, just before Abigail Sciutto plunged into some outlandish experiment that provided the clue that solved the case.

Judy King beat him to the punch. "What've you got?"

Abby was staring at the blown up fingerprint. "This fingerprint. These two—" and she gestured to the other pair of oversized fingerprints—"these two clearly belong to the vic. The whorls are correct, and the data points line up. But this one," indicating the offending print in her hand, "doesn't. It doesn't belong to the vic. The whorl is completely different."

"Keep going." Suspicion. Hope.

Abby didn't look at her captor. "We can't make the assumption that this fingerprint belongs to the killer. It's on the handle of the knife, and the knife was found by the body. There's a good likelihood that it does, but that's the next step. Before we get to that point, we need to identify who this print belongs to." She put two photos side by side. "On the left, we have the print from the knife handle. On the right, we've got a full ten fingerprints from Jason King. If we compare the knife handle print to Jason King's right thumbprint, we can see that both have a whorl."

"That doesn't help." There was danger in Judy King's tone.

"Ah, but it does." Abby pulled the photos closer. "Whoever did the matching did it by eyeballing it rather than using computer comparisons. The whorl is similar, but when you compare other data points, like at the base of the whorl and again at the top, you can see that it's not really identical. There's too much smudging to make that determination by eye."

Mrs. King pounced. "Then it's not his fingerprint. He wasn't there."

"That's going a little too fast," Abby cautioned. "I'm doing the same thing that the first forensics guy did: I'm eyeballing this. We need to run this through AFIS and get a more precise reading." She looked around and spotted the computer. "We need to send this print to the national databank."

No hesitation. "Do it," Mrs. King ordered.

Abby moved over to the computer in the corner, grabbing a cloth to wipe some of the dust off of both the screen and the keyboard. "How long has it been since this thing was used?" she complained under her breath. There was an undercurrent there as well: will this thing even work?

Step one: the thing turned on. It was slow and every screen tried to object to coming out of retirement. Abby was patient, though McGee could tell that she was well aware that each moment it took to arrive at full functionality was one more moment that McGee was trapped on the stool with a noose around his neck. _It's okay_, he wanted to tell her. _We've got all the time we need_.

Then he caught sight of the logo, and wanted to groan. The software was more than ten years old. The platform hadn't even caught up to the New Millenium, and McGee grimly wondered if it was capable of accessing the Internet, let alone navigating the various gateways necessary to run the fingerprint comparison.

Abby wondered the same thing. She straightened up. "I don't think this thing will work," she said aloud. "I can't get online."

"What's wrong?" Mrs. King moved in.

Abby tried to explain. "This thing is really old, and really slow. It's like a hundred years old, and I'm not even sure that it has an internal modem. Do you see any other computer things around here, something that should be hardwired in?"

"Like what?" Her eyes narrowed.

"Like…" Abby's voice trailed off. "McGee, what should we look for?"

McGee coughed, clearing his throat, pulling out memories from his childhood. "It would probably have some wires attached. Something square. They usually were a beige plastic. Smaller than a bread box." He tried to look around the area for the item that fit the bill, hampered by his position.

"McGee is our cyber geek," Abby explained to Mrs. King. "Like, if you want this to happen, getting your son off, you're going to have to let him down so that he can work." She gave the puppy dog eyes, the look that always ended up with a Caf-Pow and a grin from her boss.

It worked on Gibbs, but not on Mrs. King. She tossed a brief glance toward McGee before focusing back onto Abby. "Then you'd both better hope that he can explain to you what to do, because he's not going anywhere, and neither are you until you get my son declared innocent."

"But—"

"You're wasting time," Mrs. King pointed out calmly, looking at the clock on the wall. She frowned briefly; the clock had long ago decided that if the forensics lab wasn't in working order then it didn't need to be, either. She pulled out her cell phone to check on the time, then turned her attention to the rogue cops. "Zach, Will, I'm going to see what's keeping Penny with that evidence sheet that was causing such a fuss. You watch these two; don't let this man get off of that stool without him hanging by his neck."

"Yes, ma'am," one said, and McGee decided that it was the one named Zach. The letter 'Z' followed by 'King' seemed to be a giveaway. McGee could see the name neatly embroidered on the shirt above the badge, suggesting that the man really was a legitimate member of the Kings Point police force. _Not for long. Perpetrating a crime against a couple of Federal agents is going to put a quick end to your career_.

Mrs. King wasn't gone long, and when she returned there was new anger on her face.

Both Will and Zach noticed it, as well as Abby and McGee. "Aunt Judy?" Will ventured.

"They're giving him blood," Judy King told them grimly. "At least, they want to. That's what Penny said. The hospital is organizing a fast blood drive. They don't have enough." She turned on Abby, and McGee noticed that Mrs. King had an entire box in her arms. "Here. Here's the damn evidence sheet. Sign it, and make it look good. Your time is running out."

Abby accepted the paper nervously. "What do you mean?"

Mrs. King all but ignored the lab rat. "Sign the paper. And get working on the Internet connection, if you need it. Get moving." She pulled some long plastic tubing out of the box, tubing that was connected to a small clear plastic bag. Small items in clean packaging followed, things that looked suspiciously as though they belonged in a health clinic somewhere.

"I think I found a modem," Zach called out. "This it?" He held up a small box with a couple of wires dangling from it, and blew the heavy layer of dust off of it.

"It looks like it," McGee ventured. Anything to get the attention off of himself and onto someone—or something—else.

It didn't work. Abby accepted the modem—it really was one, dust and all—but everyone's attention was on what Judy King was doing. One small package got opened, exposing a kit that had a very definite hospital-like air to it: a small square of gauze, a tiny roll of tape, and a needle that to McGee looked like the forerunner of a harpoon. Mrs. King advanced on him.

"What are you doing?" Wasn't standing here waiting for the noose to tighten around his neck enough?

Apparently not. "My son needs blood," Mrs. King repeated, "and in a little while, you won't."

"Hey!" Abby objected. "You haven't given me enough time yet! I'm still working on this!"

"Work faster," the woman said, arranging her things on a small table that she dragged over to where McGee was.

She surveyed the NCIS agent looming above her, the man standing awkwardly on the stool, kept upright by the rope around his neck. "This is keeping you alive, too," Mrs. King told him.

"How do you figure that?" McGee already knew that she was crazy. It couldn't hurt to ask for the crazy answer.

"You're going to donate blood," she said, "and your blood will keep my son alive longer. If you're lucky, and your friend over there is as good as she thinks she is, he'll live and you'll live and you'll both get out of this alive. Think of this as life insurance." She frowned, not liking something. "Will, give me your penknife."

Will handed it over.

"What are you doing—hey!" McGee yelped, and then let the sound trail off.

Using the penknife, Mrs. King ripped a lengthwise slice in McGee's pants, shredding the fabric but not touching the skin beneath.

"These are my favorite pants!"

"They _were_ your favorite pants." Mrs. King didn't stop. She applied a rubber tourniquet, just above McGee's knee. "Don't move. I've got to get this needle into the vein. You move and I'll miss, and I'll have to stab you again until I get it right."

"Aren't you supposed to do that in the arm, Aunt Judy?"

"That's the usual spot," she conceded, "but this is easier to reach. And if I try to put it in his arm, we'll need to take the cuffs off. I'm not liking that idea."

"Good point. I just didn't know that you could get 'im behind the knee."

It was that knowledge that McGee too could have done without. A sharp jab, and he stifled the instinctive yelp. He didn't need Abby's flinch to tell that Gibbs's favorite lab rat was watching the scene closely, pretending to be hardwiring the recovered modem onto the ancient computer. The procedure felt odd, a slender tugging at skin and leg hair, and Mrs. King applied plenty of tape to prevent the needle from falling out. McGee couldn't see what was going on, but the signals that his flesh was sending back sufficed to give him all the information that he needed to tell that his life's blood was flowing out through the needle, down the tubing, and into the collection bag that took up space on the stool along with his feet. It was just his imagination, but McGee fancied that he could feel his strength draining along with his blood. _People give blood every day, and walk out afterward. This is no different, and I'm saving two lives: Jason King's, and my own!_

"I can't get this to work." Abby's words brought him back to reality. "It won't turn on. McGee!"

Abby was just upset, McGee told himself, stemming the rising fear in himself. They could make this work. They could keep this farce going until Ziva could call in Gibbs and the team could find them. Their part, Abby's and McGee's, was to delay until that could happen. Oh, and staying alive would be a wonderful benefit.

"Start with the basics," McGee told her, _because that way we can look productive and dawdle at the same time_. "Is it plugged in?"

Message received. Abby made a production of checking, even tugging on the cord to be certain that nothing was loose.

"Anything rattling inside the modem?"

Of course there would be. The thing was more than a decade old. Who knew what could have crawled inside and died? Another fifteen minutes of life occurred while Abby laboriously unscrewed the housing to clean it out, none of which would have happened if Abby was trying to figure out a crime scene for Gibbs in a nice, clean, and up to date lab. McGee could still feel the long needle slipped into a vein behind his knee, dripping out blood droplet by blood droplet.

"Try it now," Mrs. King demanded.

"It's not ready—"

"Don't try and fool me, missy. I'll kick that stool out from underneath his feet so fast it'll—"

"Okay!" Abby straightened up. "I'm turning it on."

It took more than a couple of minutes. The monitor screen needed to warm up, far more slowly than modern models.

It presented them with a request for a log on.

"Well?" Mrs. King snarled. "What are you waiting for?"

"This isn't my computer, or even my department," Abby snapped back. "I haven't got a log on that this thing will recognize."

Mrs. King turned to her nephews. "Log on."

Zach blanched. "If I do that, they'll be able to trace what I did."

"They're going to trace it anyway," McGee pointed out from his perch. "Any kind of automated system like this has tracking modules for everything that you do." He managed a grim smile. "If you're lucky, this thing will be so old that it won't connect with anything."

Zach gulped. It was silly to see the terrified expression on the giant of a man—no, it wasn't. It was entirely right. It was the age of the thinking man, not the man with the biggest muscles…Wait a minute. If that was true, then how come the thinking man was currently standing on a stool, waiting to be hung? McGee tightened his lips. There had to be some way out!

"I'm in," Zach announced, fear leaking out of every word.

Abby pushed him out of the way. "I'm scanning in the fingerprint," she told them. She sniffed. "I'm surprised that there's a scanner here—and that it works. Get out of my way."

Mrs. King let her captive work, watching every move. The scanner pushed a line of light along the tray, sucking in every detail of the fingerprint that the forensics people several years ago decided belonged to her son. The print appeared onto the computer screen, and Abby downsized it so that they could see the computer working to find a match.

Slow, McGee decided, not certain if he liked it that way or not. This computer worked far more slowly than anything at NCIS Headquarters, which made sense because not only was Kings Point a small town, but the machine that was running was well past retirement age. The fact that it was working at all was a minor miracle.

Speaking of which, someone had better come up with another miracle if they wanted McGee to remain among the living. It was all fine and well for Mrs. King to believe in her son's innocence, but the suspect had been convicted by a jury of his peers based on the evidence presented. Trying to prove the innocence of a guilty man was going to be tough.

McGee found his attention pulled to the crime scene photos that Abby had left on the bench. They were glossy 8 x 10's, the color mildly faded by the years. Could there be something there to explore?

There might be. There was something about the scene that was bugging him, if only he could figure out what it was. He looked again at the crime photos, at the faded red barn, at the cold ground beneath the victim, at the footprints that an experienced tracker—which McGee could honestly say that he wasn't—would be able to trace out almost exactly how Mariah Lovage had tried to fight off her attacker…

That was it. Maybe, maybe not. McGee squinted at the rap sheet of Jason King, trying to make the numbers come clear. Height of the suspect: five foot nine, shorter than McGee. Weight: one hundred eighty four pounds, which meant that Jason was a bit on the chunky side. That could either be from muscle weight or candy weight.

Didn't matter. McGee looked one more time at the crime scene photos, letting his thoughts coalesce. He cleared his throat. "Mrs. King, what size shoe does your son wear?"

Judy King looked at her captive as if he were crazy. "Why?"

"What size?" McGee pushed.

Judy King thought. "Ten. Maybe nine and a half, depending on the shoe." She stared at him, reluctant to hope that McGee had come up with a chance.

McGee twisted to talk to his fellow captive, trying not to dislodge anything that might send him cascading off of the stool to a messy death. "Abby, how large would you say that the footprints in those photos were?"

"Good question, McGee." Abby pulled herself away from the all too slow fingerprint matching program. "Did they measure?" She took hold of the case file book, flipping through the pages. "Interview with the victim's mother. Interview with the victim's father. Interview number one with the suspect. Interview number two with the suspect. Gosh, they interviewed him a lot."

"Tell me about it," Mrs. King said grimly.

Abby ignored the comment. "Here's where they contacted NCIS, and we told them that Seaman Downey couldn't provide…" She let the line slide away, gulping.

McGee saw the fire flash in Mrs. King's face, and tried to focus everyone back on a safer line of thought. "Shoes?" he prompted.

"Not here. Not in this review of the evidence. Not here. Hah; got the measurements of… nope…nope…Nope, they didn't measure the footprints," Abby said. She looked at the photos herself. "Size ten?" she mused. "Maybe…"


	6. Tiptoe thru the tulips

Small and dirty. That was how DiNozzo would describe the car rental shop. The kid at the desk probably also doubled as the mechanic, judging by the quantity of grease and oil underneath his fingernails and staining the skin on the tips of his fingers.

Crap. Not a 'he', but a 'she'. The kid's hair was cut short and what was left was tucked under a baseball cap that told the world that she was a Harley Hog. The body was lean and spare, with just enough roundness to be missed under the bulky sweats that she wore. It was the Adam's apple that clued DiNozzo in for sure: she had none. As young as she looked, the lack of any peach fuzz on the face would have been dismissed with a 'wait 'til you grow up' comment. She was young enough for DiNozzo to wonder if she had dropped out of school early.

The voice would have betrayed her, even if DiNozzo's keen investigative eye hadn't been on the ball. "Need a car, mister?"

"Need some information first." DiNozzo removed his shades and leaned on the counter. This one would require a subtle approach, one that DiNozzo knew that he had mastered many years ago. "You rent any cars in the past twenty four hours?"

"A couple. That's what I do here," she added wryly. "This place ain't a bakery."

DiNozzo smiled to show that he appreciated her wit, and pulled out stock photos of Abby and McGee. "These two come in to rent a car? Either separately or together?"

The girl examined the photos briefly. "Nope. The only folks who rented anything were Mr. Crenshaw, 'cause he's getting me to do some work on his sedan out back, and Jasper Smith who's renting my '68 red Camaro to go joyriding again. He does it almost every week," she added. "I never saw these two. Their car break down?"

"Nope. Somebody suggested that they might have gotten a car to drive off together, and I'm assuming that this is the only car rental place around…" DiNozzo let the line drift off.

The girl shrugged. "Next closest one is 'bout forty miles away, in the next town over. You can call 'em; if I can't get people what they need, they'll sometimes make a special trip out here to drop off a vehicle. They put a surcharge on the bill, for the distance," she added. "Cheaper to go through me with what I got in stock."

"You own this place?" DiNozzo couldn't help but ask.

"Yup. Shirley Rose, proprietor: Auto Sales, Rentals, and Repairs. I do it all, mister."

DiNozzo's head jerked up. "You related to Josie Rose?" Josie Rose, the girl that Bart King, Jr. and Darren Betterly had been fighting over, causing Abby and McGee to come to Kings Point?

"My sister." Shirley looked him in the eye. "That mean something to you? You involved with her case that's coming to trial?"

_Something like that, kid…_

DiNozzo changed the subject. "My boss and I just flew in." _On a military chopper, which you probably watched land in the township parking lot._

"Yeah. I heard it. A Blackhawk?" she asked hopefully, a gleam in her eye. "What kind of missiles you have on board?"

DiNozzo winced. "Nope. A Sea Ranger." _A training chopper with a student pilot and his instructor_. "Which means that he and I need something that we can drive around in. Something that doesn't mind going fast over rough terrain," he sighed. _Well, since the '68 Camaro wasn't available…_

Shirley grinned. "Got just the thing," she told him. "Got a little jeep, right over there. Not much to look at, but it doesn't mind a bit of mud."

_Maybe it doesn't, but I do_.

DiNozzo sighed, and accepted the keys.

* * *

Ziva was waiting for them on the property of Mayor Bart King, Sr., a sleek black leather laptop case at her feet on the lawn. She had left it almost undisturbed, only flipping it over to see if there was anything underneath it that would lead them quickly to the whereabouts of the missing pair. DiNozzo and Gibbs pulled up in their rented jeep, Gibbs driving and DiNozzo hanging on to anything he could to prevent getting tossed out.

The home was large and pretentious, in a faux Victorian style that owed everything to someone's imagination in the seventies and very little beyond that. There were turrets and garrets and bric-a-brac and a veranda with Adirondack chairs and lace curtains to prevent the light from entering the house to actually provide illumination. Gibbs instantly disliked it on sight, tried to tell himself that it didn't matter. The place reeked of fakery. Most of the workmanship was decent, but the repairs showed that the succeeding workmen hadn't had the same pride in their work that either the original builders or even the Victorians had.

The front lawn was large and recently mowed, the bushes clipped less recently. It was not where Ziva was waiting for them. Instead, the laptop case had been tossed along the side of the property where it could be seen from the road if someone was bothering to scan the lawn for clues.

"Ziva?" It was the only greeting that Gibbs was going to give her. The Mossad officer had lost her partner and her charge, and she knew it. Never mind that it wasn't her fault, that McGee had been the one escorting Abby at the time. Ziva had been part of the detail. The lack of warmth was as devastating as any head whack.

"Gibbs." Ziva indicated the case, swallowing her unhappiness as something that would slow the team down. "I see no footprints nearby, and the ground is soft."

"Meaning that it was flung there," Gibbs said. He surveyed the territory, noted the heavy brush that edged the back of the house. It would be easy for a group to disappear quickly among those trees. It would be tough to follow them as quickly.

'Quickly' was the operative word. The going would be slow, but it would be secure. A group of at least four—Gibbs was certain that it would take no less than two captors to keep the pair of NCIS people under control—would leave signs in the underbrush that he could follow. If anyone had taken Abby and McGee through the forest behind the mayor's home, then Gibbs would be able to follow them.

Mayor Bart and his wife and the defense attorney—Gerald King was the name of the attorney, Gibbs recalled—pulled up behind them. Gerald went on the attack. "You can't do this. This is private property."

"I'm conducting an investigation." Gibbs kept his temper under control. "I have a pair of missing NCIS people. You wouldn't want to interfere with a missing persons case, would you? Especially not one where two witnesses in your son's trial are involved?" he added pointedly to Mayor Bart King, Sr. "Wouldn't want things to look bad on the part of the defense."

"You had better not be accusing me—"

"I'm not accusing anyone," Gibbs interrupted. _Time for this nonsense? Not happening_. "Officer David saw the laptop case belonging to one of my people on your property. No one said you put it there. In fact," he added, "it would be pretty stupid of you to point a finger at yourself by doing that, wouldn't it?" _Never said that you were stupid. Not yet, anyhow_.

"Gerald?" Mayor Bart kept his eyes on Gibbs.

The defense attorney considered. "Let 'em go, Bart. He's right; he can investigate his people's whereabouts. Let 'em hunt around on the land, but don't let 'em into your house without a warrant. You hear that, Special Agent Gibbs? I don't care where the footprints lead. You want into the mayor's house, you get a warrant."

"I hear you." _And if it doesn't sound like I have enough time to get a damned piece of paper, then I'm going to be busting in, gun in hand_. "Officer David?"

Ziva made her report. "There are two sets of footprints, Gibbs. One set is old, and appears to belong to the occupants of the house. Those prints are threefold: two adult males, and one adult female, all consistent with the stated inhabitants." She nodded at the feet of the mayor and his wife, indicating that those feet were likely to have made the first set of prints. "I found another set of prints, male only, leading into the brush in the back of the house." She pointed. "The prints end there, and the one furthest from the brush shows a mildly greater indentation, suggesting that the maker threw something, causing his shoe to dig more deeply into the soil."

"McGee's laptop case." DiNozzo didn't have to guess.

"Just so. The footprints then disappear into the forest. I was about to begin tracking them when you arrived," Ziva told them.

Gibbs nodded. "Let's not waste any more time."

DiNozzo steadfastly refused to look at the fine Italian leather that his own feet were encased in, and sighed.

_Where ever you are, McGeek, I hope there isn't too much mud_.

* * *

The computer _pinged_. Abby looked up.

So did Judith King. "What's that?"

"The fingerprint scan," Abby told her. "It's finished running." She scooted her chair over to the computer stand to peer at the results. "Hah."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that I was right," Abby said. She held up the print out. "The third fingerprint, the one that was identified as belonging to Jason King, wasn't complete enough for an airtight link. There were three points of commonality, but not five. Standard is five, and that means that the print _could_ have belonged to someone else."

"Then he's exonerated," Mrs. King jumped in. "He's cleared."

"That's right," Abby smiled, giving a thumb's up. "I'll present this to the prosecutor, and she can open up the case, and you can let us go, and—"

"Not yet," Officer Zach King interrupted. "It throws the identification into doubt, but it doesn't rule Jason out. The print still could be his, or it could belong to any of a hundred people. We've got to keep on going."

"What do you mean?" Mrs. King whirled to face her nephew. "The fingerprint isn't his. We've disproved the case. They have to let Jason go!"

"We haven't disproved it, Aunt Judy," Zach grimaced. "All she's saying is that the fingerprint may or may not be Jason's, that the fingerprint isn't complete enough to be a conviction. This is an important piece, sure, but it doesn't clear him. There was other evidence, and he never could produce an alibi. We need more. We need something to _clear_ him, Judy."

Mrs. King tightened her lips. "Guess you're not ready to leave quite yet, are you, missy? The job's not done."

"You're not giving me much to work with," Abby protested. She glanced nervously at her fellow agent, seeing the tired lines in his face. "Look, I'm working as fast as I can! These things take time! You can't just wave a magic wand and get results!"

"You take as much time as you want, missy," Mrs. King said, her voice brittle. "You've got as much time as you need. Him, that's a different story." She jerked her thumb at McGee, standing on the stool pretending that he wasn't getting tired of staying still in one spot.

McGee had an answer. "Don't listen to her, Abby. Don't give in."

"How long do you think he can stand there?" Mrs. King pushed.

"It's only been a few hours," McGee argued. "I can keep this up all night long if I have to." He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "I don't suppose you'd be willing to take off the cuffs?"

Mrs. King snorted. "I think we're going to have to hurry up the clock," she said, digging into the box of medical equipment that she'd brought in earlier. She pulled out another small plastic bag, one that was empty. It looked identical to the bag that had collected McGee's blood earlier in the day, blood that had been walked to the collection point elsewhere in the building. That was what Will King had told them, after the first pint had been drained from their captive. That McGee's blood had gone to a far better place to be useful.

The needle and its tubing were still hanging uncomfortably from McGee's leg, taped in place with a syringe taking the place of the previous collection bag. Now Mrs. King switched out the syringe for the new collection bag, opening the stopcock to allow more of McGee's blood to seep down the plastic tubing to collect a second pint for her cause.

"Hey!" Abby protested. "You just took a pint from him. He shouldn't donate blood for at least a week, usually a couple of months."

Mrs. King kept going, tightening the seal on the bag to ensure sterility.

"You can't do that!" Abby kept on. "You can't—"

"You want me to stop, then you get back to work, missy." Mrs. King finally deigned to take notice of the forensics scientist's objections.

"But you're killing him—"

"Just making sure that you don't dawdle," Mrs. King said with finality. "Unless you'd rather that I jerk this stool out from under him?" She raised her eyebrows. "How long do you think he'll live, hanging by his neck?"

Abby knew the answer to that, knew it very well; it was an occupational hazard. If the fall broke McGee's neck, death would occur within seconds. If it didn't? People had been known to take hours to die an agonizing death from slow suffocation, kicking and squirming. _Don't think I could take that, McGee, watching you die. Don't do it._

Mrs. King indicated the small bag, slowly filling with McGee's blood. "Like I said, missy: I'm moving up the clock. I'm going to keep taking blood from your man here until one of two things happen. One, you find something—or you make it up, it doesn't much matter to me—that gets my son out of jail. Two: this fellow gets so weak from loss of blood that he falls over and hangs himself."

She considered her own words, and came up with another possibility. "Or three: my son dies, victim of a jailhouse stabbing, in which case I'm going to kill you both." The smile that Judy King offered had no merriment in it. "You'd best get to hustling, missy."

* * *

Gibbs knew his stuff. DiNozzo had always realized that, had always admired how his boss handled himself outside of the city, but today that took on new clarity. Gibbs had plunged into the underbrush behind the mayor's home, following the footprints that belonged to the man who'd flung McGee's laptop case into the yard.

Throwing suspicion onto the mayor? Always a possibility. DiNozzo snorted under his breath. Or it could be the mayor himself, thinking that he was throwing them off by 'implicating' himself. Too many twists, and not enough lab rats. Where the hell were Abby and McGee? Not for an instant did he think that the two of them had run off to Vegas to get married. That was fine for cheap romance novels but wasn't going to cut it for this little slice of life.

DiNozzo tried to figure out what Gibbs was seeing in the brush and gave it up as a bad job. Instead, he concentrated on keeping up; Gibbs was speeding ahead full force, pulling clues almost out of thin air. DiNozzo saw a few of the larger marks—a broken twig here, a stray line in the mud there, and yes, Dorothy, there was a lot of mud, all of which tried very hard to cling to DiNozzo's shoes—but most of the time DiNozzo couldn't tell what pulled Gibbs left instead of right.

Ziva too was content to follow Gibbs's lead, trotting along behind him and making it look effortless. DiNozzo deliberately positioned himself last so that he could watch her back, admiring the interplay of muscles, and the smooth lines that moved with a panther's grace. After so many months of working with her, DiNozzo felt that he could read her like a book: there was anger in the set of her shoulders that she had failed in her duty. DiNozzo didn't bother to tell her that it wasn't her fault, that McGee had had charge of Abby. Ziva wouldn't see it that way. She would remind him that she was the one with the expertise in protection—as an assassin, knowing protection and how to get around it was paramount—and that McGee was a mere cyber-geek.

Gibbs broke through the brush with a snort of anger. "Black top."

DiNozzo followed Ziva out, pulling his jacket from the grasp of something with thorns and leaving threads behind. He tamped down his annoyance; this had been a good suit until he'd walked through that forest! Another crime to lay at McGee's feet.

The footprints had led to a country road, the tar dark and dusty. Gibbs looked down each way, trying to determine which way the perpetrators had gone. "Back to town," he finally said.

"Boss?" _Gibbs was giving up on this lead?_

"They got into their car, DiNozzo, and headed back to town," Gibbs clarified. He pointed at tire tracks that even DiNozzo could tell were less than twenty four hours old. "Get some pictures, in case we can borrow some forensics help around here."

"On it, boss." DiNozzo pulled the camera out of his pack. Under that pack, he decided grimly, was the only intact portion of his suit. It had been protected from the elements. Big deal. He snapped several close ups of the tire treads, laying out a six inch ruler beside them for measurement purposes.

Gibbs continued to survey the surroundings, thoughts whirling in his head. DiNozzo could tell that just by looking. His boss was wondering just what the hell was going on, and why this had all gone down. DiNozzo tried to follow his lead. There had to be some connection to Abby; she was the only one who had been here before. Was there something to do with the case she was testifying on? That made sense, because the excuse for getting her to Kings Point was as flimsy as tissue paper. Stuff like forensics evidence to deny an alibi was usually presented as a deposition. Making her trek all the way out here, wasting taxpayers' money on travel and lodging and time away from her real work, was a red flag in itself. All along they'd simply thought that it was the Kings Point crowd, feeling their oats, and now something much darker had occurred.

Hah. DiNozzo was feeling himself luckier and luckier. If it hadn't been for taking that head first tumble, it would have been DiNozzo himself who was missing.

So where was McGee? Was the man still alive? If not, where was the body? If the perpetrators wanted Abby, then there was no reason to keep the junior agent around. Or maybe they were after McGee, and not Abby?

DiNozzo's head hurt, and it wasn't just because his pills were wearing off.

Gibbs grimaced. "Let's go."

"Go? Go where?"

"To pick up the vehicle you rented, DiNozzo. Unless you want to hoof it back to town?"

DiNozzo looked at the road. Then he looked at the brush that they'd just shoved their way through.

Tough choice.


	7. Backfire

Mrs. King clamped off the tubing. The second collection bag was full, gleaming bright red with McGee's blood. "Looking a little pale, there?" she taunted. The words were said to McGee but aimed at Abby.

"Doing just fine, Mrs. King." McGee refused to let himself react. "Abby, you keep doing what you're doing."

He might be okay, but his teammate was not doing well; that, McGee could easily see. Her hands shook every time that she lifted them from her paper and pencil.

This wasn't the usual sort of forensics testing that she was currently engaged in. Abby liked to play with machines, with spectroscopy and chemical analyses. If it was something that went boom, so much the better. DNA was likewise the stuff that her dreams were made of, but that didn't mean that Abigail Sciutto couldn't go back to the basics. Right now she was working at determining the size of the shoe print that they were presuming belonged to Mariah Lovage's murderer using mathematical techniques that had begun as scratching in the dirt by a few ancient Greeks. Certainly she was working the print at the scene of the crime so many years ago; whether it actually belonged to the murderer was something that a jury would decide.

No, the jury _had_ decided it. They had decided it several years past when they convicted Mrs. King's son Jason of the murder of Mariah Lovage. Now Abby was trying to find a way to prove them wrong.

The pencil in her hand was already chewed and bitten. Worn down to a nubbin would be next, the way she was making marks on her paper and then dancing over to the ancient computer to put in the data she was determining. The calculations were fairly straightforward; compare the size of the shoe print in the photo to other things in the photo where the size was a known quantity. That would give them a shoe size to work with. Jason King wore a size nine and a half. If the print belonged to a shoe either larger or smaller, it would exonerate him. The problem lay, McGee knew, in finding something else for a comparison. Everything else in the photo was of equally questionable size. Solve that, and McGee would be a free man.

Maybe. There was still this situation to defuse. There were three people in this room looking at charges of kidnapping two Federal agents, and two Federal agents hoping to be alive at the end of the day.

Abby was up to something. McGee could tell by the furtive glances she kept passing his way. McGee himself couldn't do much, not with his wrists cuffed behind him and his neck in a noose waiting to choke him with one unfortunate move. But Abby kept going back and forth to the computer, ostensibly entering data, flipping back and forth from screen to screen and then back to the table with the photos to take more measurements.

Of course! McGee could have kicked himself, it was so obvious. The computer, ancient though it was, was connected to the Internet. That meant that Abby could communicate with the outside world. She was probably sending email messages to everyone on the NCIS team as fast as she could type without Judy King looking over her shoulder. The first message would go to Gibbs, but Abby wouldn't stop there. Gibbs hated computers, hated anything close to technology, and barely put up with his cell phone. Expecting Gibbs to respond to an email would be a shot in the dark, and Abby was always one to believe in luck but play the odds. She would be sending emails to Tony, to Ziva, to Ducky and quite likely even to Director Vance. He wondered how far she'd gotten down the list; not only Mrs. King, but Will King, one of the rogue cops, was also keeping a close eye on her work.

In the meantime, she needed to keep pumping out the evidence. Abby was using the tools of the trade: a protractor, and a compass. Geometry, definitely. Calculus, perhaps, depending on the items in the photos.

She was testing the blood on the knife handle, as well. She had taken a couple of scrapings from the smears, so as not to interfere with the fingerprints found there, and had dropped the results into a test tube. The liquid solutions that she'd added were now bubbling away, heat applied to the bottom to encourage the reaction. McGee willed himself not to frown; what experiment was she running now? Blood wasn't usually put into a heat-mediated reaction. Heat would cause the blood cells to lyse, to break up into little pieces and prevent any useful data from being extracted. Testing involving blood usually was done with reagents dropped onto a microscope slide or squirted into a machine; that he knew from his undergraduate work so long ago. What was Abby up to?

Whatever it was, McGee wasn't in any position to help. All he could do at the moment was not fall down, a task that had grown more difficult as Mrs. King had siphoned off pint number two. How many pints did the average adult male possess? It wasn't one of the facts that he knew, although he was certain that Abby would be able to spout it off of the top of her head.

Mrs. King handed the second pint of blood to the other cop, Zach King. "Here," she instructed, "give this to Penny. Have her slip it into the blood drive, where it'll be of some use."

Zach flicked a glance toward Will. "You two will be able to handle them?" he asked.

"Not a problem," Will told him.

"Not a problem," Judy King echoed, picking up another empty collection bag. "Our friend here is going to have enough trouble standing up, let alone causing us grief." She slipped behind McGee and began to work on the needle still stuck in the vein in his leg. Zach, with a backwards glance, peered out through the door to the hallway beyond and exited, carrying McGee's blood donation with him hidden under his shirt.

McGee chose not to try to turn to see what she was doing. He _knew_ what she was doing, and knew that if he tried to crane around, he'd likely get dizzy and fall over. That would be bad, he told himself. Very bad. He already was feeling tired and drained—hah. A pun. A pun worthy of DiNozzo, whose place McGee had taken. _You going to appreciate what I did for you, Tony, taking your spot escorting Abby? Nah. You'll crack some stupid joke and pretend as though this was all my fault. You'll make smart remarks at my funeral._ It was harder than McGee chose to let on to merely stand here, unmoving, perched on top of this stool.

He could feel what Mrs. King was doing: she was setting up Special Agent Timothy McGee to do a third blood donation in as many hours. It was easy to sense her hands tugging on the tape that secured the harpoon in his leg, the tubing wiggling as she hooked up the third empty bag that was waiting to receive some high end red stuff. He even knew when she opened the clamp to allow his blood to flow down the tubing, felt the thrumming of the needle as it pressed along the wall of the vein.

He had options. He could step off of this stool and end this farce right now. They'd have no way to threaten Abby, no way to make her perform like a circus seal. Their quest to free Jason King would be over, along with Special Agent Tim McGee's life.

At which point, they'd probably kill Abby, too.

_Couldn't have that_. McGee realized dully that the words had been whispered, that he was no longer controlling his every action. He took a deep breath, willing the extra oxygen to compensate for his rapidly dwindling supply of blood.

There had to be a way to narrow down the suspects. They had to assume that it wasn't Jason King who was the murderer despite his conviction, and it had to be a way that he and Abby could implement from inside this dusty and unused forensics lab. They not only had to prove Jason's innocence but come up with a reasonable alternative for the courts to act. What did they have? A partial print that might or might not belong to Jason. A couple of blood smears on a knife handle which also might or might not belong to the man convicted of the crime. A bunch of crime scene photos, and a case file written by cops who saw exactly one murder in twenty years. It was no wonder the locals overlooked the obvious; they were experts at writing traffic tickets and breaking up teen age tussles behind the school, but the murder of Mariah Lovage fell into neither of those categories.

Will King started up in alarm. "What's on the computer—"

_Blam!_

The test tube—more of a large flash—exploded into shards of glass. Will was thrown back, crashing into the lab table and toppling over three shelves of glassware. He yelled out something incomprehensible, staggering back to his feet.

Abby wasn't done. She seized something long and cylindrical—McGee couldn't identify what it was, not from his perch—and went for him.

Will was ready. He batted aside the lab rat's attack, slamming her back and shoving her against the wall. Abby struggled, jabbing at his face. "Bitch! I should kill you—"

"Hold it!" Mrs. King snarled. "One more move, and I'll yank this stool out from under him!"

Abby froze. The woman meant every word. Even McGee could see that, and he wasn't even able to see Mrs. King from where she stood behind him. He could feel her, though; felt the heat of her body, could sense her bending over to take hold of the leg of the stool. He tensed his neck muscles, wondering if it would do any good.

"Stupid move," Mrs. King said finally, acknowledging that she and her nephew had won. "Get back to work."

"Not yet," Will said, equally as angry and breathing hard. "Look at the computer, Aunt Judy."

Judy King moved from behind McGee to the computer, confident that her nephew had the recalcitrant forensics scientist under control. "Trying to send emails, missy? We'll put an end to that right now." She yanked, and the ancient modem fell to the floor. The computer gave a plaintive beep.

"Hey!" Abby protested. "How can I work—"

The look of fury that Mrs. King turned on her caused Abby to quail. "You are working for the cause of righteousness! You will get my son off, or both you and your friend will die! You hear me? Both of you, dead!"

* * *

"What was that?" Gibbs turned his head.

Ethan King, Chief of Police, shrugged. "Car backfired."

"Didn't sound like it."

Ethan shrugged again. "Plenty of old cars around here. They usually sound a bit funny."

Gibbs was not happy. He still had two people missing, and his leads were drying up. DiNozzo from long years of experience could tell just by the way his boss was standing that Gibbs was not only unhappy but downright angry. That was good. Anger was good, because it meant that Gibbs thought that the case was still active, that Abby and McGee were still alive. Dead would have meant a miserable Gibbs, and a miserable Gibbs was an intolerable Gibbs, and DiNozzo still needed to finish this case and travel back to D.C. in the company of Gibbs and Ziva and Abby and McGee. DiNozzo did not want to travel in the company of a miserable Gibbs. Traveling in the company of a satisfied Gibbs was tough enough.

Therefore, Abby and McGee had to be alive.

That was a good thing. DiNozzo couldn't stomach the thought that the little lab rat might be dead. She was the safe one, the one that worked in the lab pulling off forensics miracles. McGee was a field agent, and every agent knew that every time he grabbed the tools of the trade and left Headquarters might be the last time that he sat at his desk. DiNozzo would mourn, but death was a part of every field agent's outlook on life.

Not Abby. Not the little Goth-child, that unique combination of brilliance and quirk. There was no way that DiNozzo wanted her to rest in her coffin for that last time, and he was pretty sure that if it should happen, it would take Gibbs down, too. Gibbs had weathered some bad storms in his time and barely kept his head above the emotion-tossed waters, and there was a good chance that he wouldn't weather this one.

No Abby, no team.

Like _hell_ that was going to happen.

They needed a lead. McGee's laptop case was going nowhere. Mayor Bart Sr. tossing it onto his own lawn? Puh-leeze. That was a really poor attempt at distraction.

Maybe not. It had worked. Gibbs and company had spent over an hour tracking the footprints through the brush, only to be thwarted by a car picking up the footprint maker on the other side of the forest. Total waste of time for Team NCIS. Perps: one. NCIS: zilch.

It was time to get to pull it together. It was time to _act_, and not _react_. As DiNozzo watched, Gibbs moved into high gear. "There are exactly two connections that either Abby or McGee have with this town: this trial, and the one that Abby testified on a few years ago. Ziva—"

"Case file on the Bart King, Jr. assault. On it." She nodded her head.

"DiNozzo—"

"Old case, Jason King. I'll head into the Stacks for it." DiNozzo turned to Chief Ethan. "Which floor?"

"Don't need it, son." Now that the NCIS agents had been truly classified as 'missing', the police chief was more cooperative. "We've moved into the New Millenium. We're computerizing everything." He tapped in a few commands into the nearest computer and brought up the file. "There. That has everything, including your friend's testimony. Have at it." He turned to Gibbs. "What're you looking for?"

Gibbs shook his head. "Anything. Everything." He looked around, not really seeing the scene around him.

"Boss?"

Gibbs moved to the window, looking over the parking lot from his second floor advantage. "That didn't sound like a backfire. I don't see any cars moving." He turned away, thinking. "Chief, the man convicted of murder was Jason King. I want to talk to him. Where is he jailed?"

Chief Ethan's face hardened. "Right now, he's at the County Hospital. Got himself stabbed in a prison brawl, not looking too good." He jerked his chin toward another part of the building. "We're holding a blood drive for the kid; Penny Eaton's running it. Some of us thought he got a bad deal, that maybe the case wasn't so cut and dried as Gerald made it seem."

"Gerald?"

"Gerald King. He was the prosecutor at the time. Retired to go into the private sector. Now we got Ms. Connors. She's pretty good, even though she's likely to tread on a few toes every now and again."

"Gerald King? Same lawyer that's defending Bart, Jr.?"

"That's the one. Why?" Ethan asked. "You thinking something?"

"Chief, I'm always thinking something," Gibbs assured him. He came to a decision. "Chief, I want to talk to Gerald King."

* * *

McGee looked bad. His face was white, and there were beads of sweat standing out on his face. Abby couldn't stand to look at him, for fear that she'd see him topple over and hang himself.

It was going to happen soon; of that, Abby was certain. The third pint of blood was being walked upstairs to the blood drive by Will King, and McGee was pumping out his fourth. How much more could they take from him before he couldn't stand up any more? It couldn't be much. There was only just so much blood that a human body could lose at one time before shock and collapse set in.

There were only two options left: one, McGee died and then Abby would die because she would have no reason to continue to play their game or two, Abby would come up with the evidence, real or faked, that would get them out of this mess. Of course, that was assuming that Mrs. King would let them go. Abby really shouldn't assume that, because she knew that kidnappers tended to kill their victims once the kidnapees had seen the faces of the kidnappers.

This, however, was different. Mrs. King wasn't just a kidnapper. She was a mother, and she was defending her child the best way she could. It happened to be illegal and it happened to be threatening a couple of Federal agents' lives, but to Mrs. King that was an acceptable trade-off. She intended to free her son no matter what the cost to herself—or a couple of bystanding agents. Even the careers of the two cop nephews were expendable.

Okay, it didn't look like Abby was going to be able to rework the evidence that she'd been presented with. Sure, the guy that had done the work had been sloppy beyond belief, but that didn't mean that Abby could completely rework it all. She didn't have the tools, and some of the evidence had degraded over the years. She was good, but nobody was that good.

That left fakery. Abby had solved plenty of false leads in her time, and she was sure that she could come up with something that would fool Mrs. King and both of the rogue cops. It didn't have to fool a jury, just provide enough doubt to get McGee and herself out of here. She began to catalog all the supplies she had in the lab; whatever she did, it was going to have to look impressive to get Mrs. King to believe.

It also had to be fast. One look at McGee assured her of that.

He was mumbling.

"What?"

"Abby." It was an effort for him to speak above a whisper.

"What?" She moved toward him, stopping only when Zach placed himself in her path, not willing to allow Abby to get too close to McGee. With the other cop upstairs delivering a pint of McGee's finest, it was two to two, never mind that one of the two NCIS people was strung up by his neck making a corpse look lively. Zach King wasn't taking any chances.

McGee licked his lips to moisten them. "The fingerprint."

"Right. It's a partial. I got like a thousand hits off of it before Jumbo here crunched the modem." It had been Will who had yanked out the computer modem, not Zach, but that wasn't important.

"Cross-match them…" McGee swayed. With an effort, he straightened himself. "Zip codes."

"Zip codes…?" Was he crazy? Had the lack of blood addled his wits?

McGee tried again. "Eliminate everyone not in this area…"

"But that's…" Abby trailed off.

McGee was right. It was normally something that she would ask the computer to do, to cross-reference the partial prints against the people likely to be in the area. It was grunt work. It was tedious. It was a task that a human would spend an eight hour day grumbling over and a computer could compress it into three minutes. It was perfect for a computer.

This computer, however, had just had its communication line yanked. It could no longer access the list of partials and the zip codes in the surrounding area of Kings Point. It could cross-reference the two lists but only if someone laboriously entered each data point by hand which made the whole data entry thing sort of useless, Abby realized. It would be just as easy—and just as time consuming—to do by hand.

McGee didn't have that kind of time. There was a good chance that it would take a couple of hours to go through all the data points of information, and by then there was an equally good chance that by the time she was finished her fellow agent would be hanging by the noose around his neck. If Mama Bitch kept forcing him to donate blood to her son, McGee was going to pass out and fall off the stool and hang.

On the other hand, was there a better option? Abby didn't think so.

_Gibbs, where are you?_


	8. Evidence

Gerald King exited the courthouse, the senior Bart King behind him and the mayor's wife trailing after. The trio walked out of the tall brick building, breathing in the cool autumn air and enjoying the sunshine around them. There was only an expanse of a parking lot before them, but it was the public parking lot and kept in better repair than the one behind the building where the police squad cars were kept. The entrance to the courthouse was likewise cleaner than the back entrance to the police station, where drunks would routinely relieve themselves before the night's incarceration to sleep off whatever potion they had ingested.

"Successful outcome?"

Gerald turned at the drawling voice. "Agent…" he struggled artistically for the name.

"Gibbs," the NCIS agent supplied, keeping it cool. "You win?"

"Not exactly," Gerald replied, although he couldn't suppress the element of victory in his tone. "We got the boy probation. Heat of the moment, you understand. The judge understood. Wouldn't want to ruin his life."

"Certainly not the way he ruined the Betterly boy's life," Gibbs observed, keeping the sarcasm understated. "From what I hear, the victim will be using a cane for the rest of his life." He shifted his weight. "Sounds as though you did fine without the prosecution's forensic witness to testify to the whereabouts of someone who wasn't even there."

"The NCIS agent? What was her name? Scotto, something like that?"

"Sciutto. Abigail Sciutto. The one who's missing, along with the field agent assigned to her." It was amazing how much promise of danger could be embedded into a few calm words. "It makes me wonder, Mr. King, just why you felt the need to have her come in person to give testimony."

Mayor Bart and his wife's eyes flashed, but Gerald King merely chuckled. "Agent Gibbs, in my line of work, you learn many tricks. One of those tricks is how to keep the opposition off guard and distracted. I'd say that in this case, it worked just fine."

"Did it work just fine some eight years ago?"

"Beg pardon?" Gerald went for an expression of 'confused'.

"Eight years ago," Gibbs repeated, "when you prosecuted Jason King for murder. You insisted that Abby Sciutto come out to give testimony in person as to another broken alibi. You weren't satisfied with a written deposition then, either. Why would that be, Mr. King?"

"Really, Agent Gibbs, I couldn't comment on a case that I prosecuted that many years ago. I certainly don't remember the details. Can you refresh my memory?"

"I don't think that will be necessary, Mr. King. After this, I suspect you'll do all the refreshing that you need very soon. Tell me, Mr. King: have you discussed the Jason King case with anyone in the last few months?"

"Only you, Agent Gibbs." Gerald was getting annoyed. "What are you getting at?"

Gibbs gave a tight smile. "Only that someone had a very great interest in getting Abby Sciutto to return to Kings Point, and there are only a few someones that fit that description."

"Are you accusing me of the kidnapping, Agent Gibbs? Be careful; I can file a suit for slander."

"Feeling guilty, King?" Gibbs refused to allow himself to be rattled. "I'm not the one making the accusations. Be careful of jumping to conclusions; they can get you into all sorts of trouble."

Gerald King's eyes narrowed. "We're done here, Gibbs."

Gibbs nodded. "For now." He watched as Gerald hustled the mayor and his wife away, watched as each of the trio threw a nervous glance in his direction before getting into their car. Yeah, there was something there. Question was: what was it?

That brought back another thought: the backfire. Gibbs scanned the parking lot, using long legs to walk up and down the rows of cars. It wasn't a large lot, and it didn't need to be in a small town such as Kings Point. It held the usual gamut of cars, from the high end luxury Lincoln in the slot assigned for the judge's use to the decade old junk heap sitting in one slot. If there was any car that would backfire, Gibbs would bet that it was that one. He made a point of resting his hand on the hood, not surprised when the engine felt cold. No, this was not the vehicle that had backfired. This engine hadn't turned over for at least a week.

If not this one, then which car? The pavement came in for its own share of scrutiny. A backfire would send out a cloud of soot that would impinge on the ground, and that was exactly what Gibbs was _not_ seeing. There was the occasional oil slick and even a black streak of rubber where someone had taken off a little too quickly, but no recent spots that indicated that an engine in need of a tune up had voiced a protest.

Not in this parking lot, but there was the parking lot behind the building, near to the entrance to the police station, and that was equally if not more likely to be where the maltreated engine had backfired. Gibbs circled around the building—really, it was three brick buildings cobbled together to form a municipal complex—and started surveying the back parking lot as well.

The back lot was smaller than the one in front and therefore easier and faster to look at. All but two of the police squad cars were out doing their job, and Gibbs was able to look over the tarmac quickly. Another heavy streak of oil suggested why at least one of the squad cars wasn't on the road. He didn't see any rubber marks on the pavement; none of the cops seemed eager to leave home base. More importantly: no soot marks. No backfire.

Which meant that whatever it was, the noise hadn't come from a backfiring car.

Gibbs tried to remember exactly what it had sounded like. It was a difficult task; the noise had been brief and none of them had been listening for it. The more he thought about it, however, the more important it seemed. Something falling over? Not a chance; there hadn't been the clatter of something rolling away. It was a familiar noise, though. Where had he heard it before?

Gibbs closed his eyes, insisting that the memory come forth. It had been loud, but muffled. Muffled, how? Muffled by several walls, as though it was a distance away. That in itself ruled out a car backfiring; if it had been a car, the noise would have been clearer and easy to hear through the single pane of glass. Okay, car backfire definitely ruled out. What next? It was familiar…

It _was_ familiar. It was an explosion. Gibbs was very familiar with explosions, had heard more than his share during his tours overseas. He was very familiar with loud noises and was now ready to declare that what he had heard was not a car backfiring. It was not gunfire. It was, however, an explosion.

Where would an explosion take place that wouldn't send people running for cover? Or calling the fire or police department? Where were explosions normal? Not many places, that was for damn sure.

* * *

DiNozzo frowned at the computer screen. Ziva watched him; for her colleague to glare at a computer was not an unusual occurrence. Today, however, given the circumstances, she was willing to explore his actions.

"Tony?"

"There's a chunk of data missing," he complained, knowing that the chief of police was sitting at a desk very close by to keep an eye on the visiting talent. "I'm seeing a bunch of reports from the investigating officers, but the corroborating forensics evidence was never scanned in."

Ethan King, Chief of Police, shrugged. "It's not as though backing up old cases is a priority," he said. "We got enough work to keep us busy."

"I'm sure you do," DiNozzo returned politely through his teeth, carefully not discussing that concentrating on traffic tickets when there were two missing Federal agents in his backyard might not be the best use of official time.

"Call down to Evidence," Ethan King suggested, completely missing the sarcasm. "Let Penny know what you want. It's not a big deal. She'll get it for you."

"Already tried that," DiNozzo told him. "There's no answer." _And I hope this 'Penny' or whoever she is, had the good sense to lock up when she goes for a coffee break_. To Ziva, her teammate's thoughts were obvious. It was amazing what could be communicated through a simple relaxation of the shoulders while leaning back in a hard wooden chair.

"That's right," Ethan remembered. "She's out running the blood drive. You really need something, I'll have one of the boys fetch it for you. You need it right now?"

"That would be nice." DiNozzo fought a losing battle to keep the sarcasm out.

Ziva could sense the frustration in her teammate, and tried to intervene. "There is little that I am finding in this current case file to suggest why anyone would want to abduct Abby and McGee. Perhaps I can find your evidence clerk—"

"No need," Ethan interrupted. "There she is now. Hey, Penny," he called to the young girl walking by. "Listen, we need some stuff from Evidence. You got a minute?"

The young girl froze on a dime, looking at the things in her arms, all items related to the blood drive: sterile plastic bags and tubing, bright white packages that warned of sharp objects within. Then she glanced at the tall and burly officer beside her. Penny relaxed, and frowned. "Not really, chief. I've got to get this stuff upstairs. Some of this needs to be in a cooler." She indicated the small bag that looked dark red with freshly donated blood. "Can I get back to you in about twenty minutes, half hour?"

"We're kind of in a hurry—" DiNozzo started to say.

Ziva put in her own interruption. "I am aware of what we need. Perhaps, Chief King, someone else could escort me to the Evidence Room? You have told me that your files are not extensive; I should be able to find the evidence swiftly."

She wasn't going to take no for an answer; Ziva communicated _that_ with her own stiffening of the spine and made it obvious. Police Chief Ethan King grimaced; someone was actually going to have to do work.

The burly officer beside Penny spoke up, rescuing his superior officer. "I'll take her down, Chief. I got a minute."

"Good. You do that, Will." Ethan was relieved to have this problem solved so easily. "Make sure that the little lady gets what she needs." _So that the Big Bad Federal Agents stay out of my hair_, was the unvoiced half of the statement.

Ziva rose from her chair, grateful for any excuse to move. "Where is the Evidence Room?" she asked, peering at the man's name tag. "Officer King?"

"That's right, ma'am," the cop said. "Will King." He led her to the elevator. "Evidence is on the second floor. Elevator or stairs?"

"Stairs," Ziva selected, opting for the faster route. She'd been on the elevator, and knew how slowly it progressed. It would also give her the opportunity to work off some nervous energy, worry that had been piling up ever since she'd found her teammates missing in action. "Is everyone in this town named King?"

Will King chuckled. "No, not everyone, ma'am. A lot of us. But there are at least, oh, two-three families in Kings Point. There are the Roses. The Betterly's. The Downey's—"

"Yes, I get the picture." Ziva didn't smile. "The Evidence clerk; what was her name?"

"Who, Penny?"

"Yes, she is the one. Is she also a King?"

"Nope. An Eaton."

"A cousin of yours, perhaps?"

"Nope. No relation." Will King also wasn't smiling. "Your point?"

"No point," Ziva lied. "Simply making—how do you put it?—making conversation. Is this the Evidence Room?" she asked, coming out onto the second floor landing, as if the door in front of them didn't bear, in large black letters, the legend 'Evidence Room'.

"Yes, ma'am." Will reached out a long arm over her head to push open the door, first unlocking it with a key that he fished out of his pocket.

Ziva noticed. "Every officer carries a key to the Evidence Room?" This was unusual; most law enforcement departments limited the number of people with master keys.

"Yes, ma'am," Will said once again and added, chuckling, "we're not big enough to be able to afford not to be able to get into things. This master lets me in just about everywhere. I suspect I could get into the mayor's office with this thing."

"I see." That, if what Ziva suspected was true, would add an additional layer of complexity over the scene. She looked over the set up, not at all happy. There was a paper-strewn desk by the door, followed by long lines of shelves, each bearing several dozen rectangular boxes of pressed cardboard, medium brown, and stacked neatly on sturdy metal shelves. A fire waiting to happen, Ziva couldn't help but think. It was a good thing that the Kings Point police department was putting whatever they could onto computer files. Loss of evidence could happen with a split second of carelessness. The sparseness of boxes in the row of 'A's' and 'B's' suggested that Penny—currently running the blood drive—had made a good start with the electronic conversion but still had quite a ways to go. _Get to the 'K's'_, Ziva couldn't help but think. _Once that letter had been completed, the rest would fly through the conversion process. _"And where would I find the evidence in the Jason King murder?"

"Let's see. We've got a filing system over here."

"Not alphabetized, I hope?" Ziva couldn't help but ask. "With so many residents with the surname of 'King', it would make the 'K' file intolerably large."

Will laughed amiably. "We just move on to the first name, ma'am, and then to date of birth. We've got a few 'juniors' and 'seniors' and even a couple of 'the third's' in the new generation of Kings. Of course, most of those little 'uns aren't old enough to do more than wet their pants, but in another few years…" He let the statement trail off.

Ziva hoped that a small smile would suffice to move the investigation along. "The evidence file?" she prodded.

"Let's see. Ought to be in this row, over here." Officer King led her down a long stack of boxes, each one bearing the legend of what had been interred within. In this particular row, each label did indeed proclaim that the primary suspect had had the last name of 'King'. Some boxes contained only case files; others, of a darker nature, held physical evidence related to the crime. Not all cases were noted to be closed. A distressing number hadn't yet received closure in years.

"Hah." Will was puzzled. "The Jason King evidence box is missing."

It was. Ziva could see the hole in the neat stacks of boxes, saw that the dust had been disturbed, and recently.

"Let's see who signed it out." Will led her back toward the front of the Evidence room, toward the desk. "_If_ anyone signed it out at all, although I can't imagine Penny letting just anyone take it. She's a stickler for signatures."

"Chain of evidence," Ziva agreed. _This might account for the girl's nervousness when accosted by Chief Ethan. Perhaps the hard-working and conscientious Penny is not as innocent as everyone seems to believe?_

"Evidence sign-in book." Will flipped through the large notebook on the corner of the front desk, going through the pages. "Alphabetized. F's. I's—gee, I remember locking up Harry Irving overnight for drunk and disorderly, right after the senior prom let out. He had to miss the rest of the prom activities. Served the little twerp right. Okay, here it is. The Jason King evidence box. Signed out at 10:03 AM, today."

"By whom?" Ziva pounced.

Will peered at the scrawled signature. "Can't really read it…doesn't look like any of ours." He straightened, a look of puzzlement on his face. "Ma'am, it was signed out by Abigail Sciutto."

* * *

McGee kept his eyes closed, for more than one reason. First, there simply wasn't any benefit to keeping them open. The scene before him didn't look any more promising than it had when he and Abby had been dragged into the Kings Point forensics lab. Second, lack of blood was stealing the clarity from his vision. Things just didn't look right with blackness around the edges and squiggly lines blurring the scene. He preferred his image of Abby with the black and white in clear delineation, not as an amorphous blob.

The overriding reason, however, was sheer lack of energy. It was gone. He was wiped. Standing too had become problematic; his legs felt like jelly, like that time in the gym while he was still in training to become an agent. He'd been working out with the instructor, what was his name? Too much effort to remember. What McGee did remember was the instructor landing a jab mid-section, right in the sweet spot. Breathing didn't happen for another sixty seconds, and McGee had toppled to the mat, certain that he'd never draw another breath for the rest of a very short life.

It felt like that. No breath. Or maybe lots of breathing in and out but no oxygen getting to where it needed to be. Whatever it was, it wasn't going to go on for very much longer. McGee felt the noose around his neck and this time he welcomed it. Leaning sideways, it now provided an additional ounce of support to keep him standing. As long as he didn't fall, he could lean into the rope and let it help to keep his heavy head from toppling over…

"McGee!"

It was Abby, clinging to his legs. McGee drew in a deep breath, wishing that it would strengthen him as much as it usually had during the past couple of hours.

"McGee! Wake up! McGee, you've got to keep standing!"

_Too tired_, he tried to tell her. _You go on without me_.

"McGee, you can't give up now!"

_Yes, I can. In fact, it would be pretty easy_.

"McGee, promise me you'll keep standing! McGee, you have to! McGee, what'll Gibbs say if you give up now?"

_Got a point, there, Abbs_. Summoning the rest of his fleeting strength, McGee willed his knees to lock into place, feeling the blood drain from his head and go to the more important spot: his legs. _I'll keep this up for a while longer. Not too long, but a little while longer._

_And the damn instructor's name was Ben King_. _No relation, I think_.


	9. Not Quite Done

"This is not Abby's signature." Holding the Evidence sign-in book, there was no doubt in Special Agent Leroy Gibbs's mind. "This is her name, but this is not her signature. Abby did not sign out that evidence box, and the chain-of-evidence sheet is missing along with the box."

"What the heck does it mean?" Chief Ethan was bewildered. "Why would someone sign out a box using her name? And where the heck has Penny gotten herself to?"

"Put out an APB on her," Gibbs ordered grimly. "Find her."

"Hey, wait just a minute, Gibbs! This is my department—"

Gibbs rounded on the police chief. "You've got a forged signature in a sign-out book and a missing Evidence clerk. How much more evidence do I need to ram down your throat? The bodies of a couple of dead Federal agents? Because that's what it's going to come down to if you don't get moving!"

The dull crimson flush stole into Chief Ethan's jaw. He turned to Will King. "Put it out."

"Chief?"

"Put out the damn APB," he ground out. "Penny had better have a damn good explanation for what's going on."

"I'll see to it," Will promised. He spun on his heel, heading off in the opposite direction.

Ziva watched him go, clearly unhappy.

Gibbs noticed. "Officer David?"

Ziva bit her lip. "This is my fault. I should have stopped the Evidence clerk when I saw her in the hall." Ziva shook her head. "She was nervous, and there was no reason for her to be, when Chief King stopped her to request assistance in the Evidence room. I should have known then that she was involved."

"No way you could have," Gibbs reassured her. He turned back to Chief King. "Where does she live? We'll check out her place."

Ethan jerked his thumb toward the window. "Right there. Across the street. She's got a little apartment there, moved out from her folks about a year or two ago."

That stopped Gibbs. "She won't be there, and neither will my people. If you kidnap someone, you don't take them to some place where other people can hear them yell their heads off."

DiNozzo moved in. "We can toss it for clues as to where she took them."

"You do that, DiNozzo—" Gibbs broke off.

DiNozzo waited. "Boss?"

It clicked. They all saw it, coming together in the steel trap of Gibb's mind. "Chief. Who is your forensics man?"

"Don't have one. He retired 'bout five years ago, and we never bothered to hire another one. Waste of the taxpayer's money. We send up to County if we have a real need."

It fit. "Jason King is hospitalized. It's not him; he's not involved. Who else were the principles in the case?"

DiNozzo started listing them. "Mariah Lovage was the victim in the Jason King case. Josie Rose was the girl that Bart junior and the Betterly kid were fighting over. Her sister Shirley, the car rental shop owner, testified on behalf—"

"Any of 'em listed as forensics specialists? Anybody at all?"

"No, boss."

Gibbs turned to Ethan King. "Where's the lab?"

"Gibbs—"

"Where's the damn forensics lab?" The words were soft, but edged with steel.

"You can't think—"

"You got a better explanation?" Gibbs got into Chief King's face. "DiNozzo. David. We'll start in the basement—"

"Cellar level," Ethan King told him sullenly. "The forensics lab. It's all boarded up. You can only get into it by going outside and around."

Gibbs moved. "DiNozzo, David. Let's move."

"I'm going with you," Ethan ground out.

"Your building, chief." Gibbs threw him a meaningful glare. "_My_ people, and _my_ operation."

* * *

The municipal complex belonged to the people of Kings Point, represented in the person of Chief Ethan King, but it was Gibbs's expedition. King had brought along two of his men, just to keep the numbers even on both sides, but there was no question of who was calling the shots.

The cellar level, for some unfathomable architectural reason, had been walled off from the rest of the Kings Point municipal complex. In a more calm time, DiNozzo decided, he would be able to trace the growth of the complex from a single brick building to the monstrosity that it was today, but that would have to wait for a more opportune time. There was still a certain Goth lab rat to rescue. Oh, and yeah, a certain computer geek, too, without whom DiNozzo would have to delete more than half of his very best jokes. DiNozzo needed a target for those smart remarks, and McGee fit the bill admirably. It would take entirely too long to find a replacement target even half as suitable.

The group trekked outside to the police station parking lot and around to the side where the entrance to the cellar was. The area was overgrown with weeds, demonstrating that the groundskeepers had as little interest in the cellar as the rest of the complex. It had been dumped and left to return to the wilderness which was rapidly encroaching. Only two of the trees within six feet of the door had been planted by human hands. The rest were an outgrowth of forest.

"Fresh scratches on the lock," Gibbs observed grimly. "Chief?"

Ethan King was equally as bleak. "No one should be down there," he said. "Only got the forensics lab in there, and an old storage room for stuff too big to fit in Evidence."

"Think we can get in without being heard?" DiNozzo asked.

"Think we're going to try." Gibbs spent a long minute with his ear to the door, listening for any sounds beyond. "Not hearing anything. Spread out, just in case."

As the others lined themselves against the wall, Gibbs put his shoulder to the entranceway, slowly and insistently forcing the heavy metal to slide open.

It moved more easily and soundlessly than any door of its obvious age had any right to, and Gibbs exchanged another meaningful glance with his Kings Point counterpart. "A little oil on the hinges, maybe?"

Ethan tightened his lips. There was no rejoinder to that. "Move in."

It was like going into the bowels of hell. Not one but two flights of stairs lay in front of them, the second dirtier than the first and covered with cobwebs so old they qualified as antiques. In a better day, this place had been bustling, the furnishings kept up with regular applications of paint to the walls and a cleaning service to get rid of the dust and debris. Now it was a forgotten dungeon.

Except for one thing: footprints in the dust. The hinges were not the only things that bore evidence of recent use. The footprints were fresh, the edges crisp. Gibbs bent to examine them, and now he went to non-verbal communication: five fingers up meant five people walking through. Three fingers on one hand, and two on the other: three men and two women. DiNozzo read one more thing on his boss's face: the scuffling in the dust meant that two of the people who had walked through this corridor had not gone willingly.

His eyes adjusted to the gloom, and the heft of his handgun felt reassuring in his hand. Something was going to be happening very soon, of that DiNozzo had no doubt, and that something was likely going to require the application of force of one kind or another. It was highly unlikely that Abby and McGee were here by choice.

There was a small fight at the front, with Chief Ethan King wanting to lead. Not happening; these were Kings Point people up ahead, and not one of the NCIS agents could say for sure that the locals could do what needed to be done. Gibbs led, but Chief Ethan moved his bulk into second place.

Not a problem; DiNozzo trod close on his heels and was ready to keep the Kings Point police chief on the straight and narrow. Ziva? Not sure. The Mossad agent ghosted off into the gloom in another direction, checking it out, leaving the pair of Kings Point beat cops to look around themselves uncertainly. Normally that sort of behavior annoyed DiNozzo. Not today. Today Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo was pleased to have the annoyance on someone else's side.

She returned too soon. "Dead alley," she whispered.

DiNozzo forgave her the inaccurate English phrase. It wasn't important. What was important was that they'd spotted a glow of light up ahead. There were voices, too, muffled behind another door labeled 'Forensics'.

DiNozzo couldn't see who was in the forensics lab in front of them, wouldn't be able to swear in a court of law that it was anything more than a female voice and a male voice. Didn't matter; he and Gibbs and Ziva knew that they'd found their missing teammates.

Too bad they'd found a heck of a lot more.

* * *

Was it really fair to keep him suffering like this?

McGee wasn't responding to Abby's comments anymore. He wasn't giving her a wink when he thought that Judy King wasn't looking, to keep up her spirits. He wasn't giving her feedback on her work, not making any suggestions. All he could do was to stand there, shivering. Any minute Abby expected him to fall, for the noose to tighten around his neck and choke him until he was dead.

There were four matches for the partial fingerprint from the crime that Jason King had committed that corresponded to people who lived in the Kings Point area. One belonged to Jason King. For the moment, Abby was going to keep the identities of the others to herself because knowing that the print could have belonged to someone else wasn't going to be enough to prove Jason innocent. If it wouldn't prove innocence, then Judy King wasn't going to let the two NCIS agents go. Right now, getting McGee out of this place was the highest importance.

Mrs. King finished clamping off the tubing, removing pint number four from circulation. How many pints could McGee afford to give up before he toppled over? Ducky would know. Abby was supposed to know, but that little tidbit of information was deliberately hiding from her and she wasn't about to hunt it down in the recesses of her brain. Not with McGee swaying on the stool in front of her, ready to fall off and hang himself.

Gibbs wasn't coming. Not in time, anyway. He wasn't going to find them, and McGee was going to hang until he was dead and Abby was going to get killed too because she couldn't find a way to prove Jason King innocent because he really was guilty and…and…

Wait.

The crime scene photo.

It was there.

It was a simple calculation that any reasonably intelligent fifth-grader could perform. Would it tell her what she wanted to know? More to the point, could she make it _seem_ like it would prove Jason King's innocence?

"What was that?" Zach King, one of the rogue cops, picked up his head.

"What was what?" Judy King moved to where she had forced McGee into his hostage position and positioned herself beside the stool on which McGee stood. "Maybe it's Will, coming back. He's been gone a long time."

"Too long," was Zach's opinion. "He should have been back by now." He turned irritably to Abby. "How much longer?"

"I'm almost there." Abby was taking measurements from the crime photo. It had to be exact, because she was working with really small numbers. A single inaccuracy could ruin the whole thing.

"Give me a piece of rope," Judy King told her nephew.

That caught Abby's attention. She looked up. "Why do you need more rope?"

"You just keep working, missy." Mrs. King looped one end onto the leg of McGee's stool, tying the other end to her own wrist. "This is none of your concern."

"Aunt Judy…" Zach trailed off uncertainly.

He was right to be concerned. Abby looked at what Mrs. King had done, and quailed inwardly.

It was now a two for one deal: if anything happened to Mrs. King—if, for example, some concerned SWAT team type cop took one look and shot her dead—then, as Mrs. King fell to the ground, the movement would pull the stool out from under McGee's feet. He would be left dangling by the neck, choking until he was dead.

Four minutes. That was how long the brain could be left without oxygen before brain damage set in.

Abby knew better. The four minute rule was a general guideline, and was based on the assumption that the brain had been well-oxygenated in the first place. McGee's brain was currently _not_ well-oxygenated. He didn't have enough red blood cells to carry oxygen to his brain, which meant that he didn't have four minutes worth of oxygen left in him. How long would he actually have? Good question, and one that Ducky would be better equipped to answer, only Abby didn't want Dr. Mallard to be put into the position of having to answer it. McGee, laid out on a cold autopsy table? McGee, with Ducky sorrowfully making the Y incision into his chest in order to examine the condition of the lungs before he died?

_Please, Gibbs! Look, I'm sorry that I said you weren't coming! I take it back! Please come right now!_

"Look, you don't have to do this," Abby pleaded. "I'm almost there. I've almost got the answer. Just another minute or two!"

"Best get to it, missy," Mrs. King said calmly. "The sooner you come up with the evidence, the sooner this will all be over." She finished tying the end of the rope to her wrist, and gave a small, experimental tug to make certain that it wouldn't come loose. "There. I think you'd best get moving along, Zach. Tell them that I made you do this, you and Will."

"Aunt Judy…" Zach King wasn't certain what to do at the moment. What he'd done was wrong, though in a good cause; this was going to be worse.

Mrs. King deliberately misunderstood him. "It'll be all right, Zach. Little missy forensics gal over there knows that if she tries anything, her tall friend here will be dead before she can cut him down. Don't you, missy?"

"I won't try anything," Abby promised immediately. "I'm almost done with this. You can let us both go."

"That's good to hear," Mrs. King reassured her. It wasn't reassuring in the least. "You go ahead, Zach. You make sure that my Jason is still alive, and you let me know. Okay?"

Zach swallowed. "Okay." With clear misgivings, he moved to the door. Pulling it open, he moved out into the dingy corridor beyond.

The scene exploded.

"Federal Agents!" Gibbs yelled, pulling Zach King out and slamming him against the wall of the corridor. "Nobody move!" Leaving the rogue cop in the hands of his police chief, Gibbs, DiNozzo, and Ziva advanced into the ancient forensics lab. "Nobody move!"

"Stay out!" Mrs. King yelled back at him. "One more step, and he's dead!"

* * *

Gibbs stared at her. He'd known that it would be bad, but he hadn't imagined this. He let the scene flood over him, taking it all in over one short instant:

Abby, huddled over a table, scratching frantic scribbles onto paper with a photo in front of her.

McGee, eyes closed, high in the air on top of a stool, noose around his neck. Hands cuffed behind him.

Gray-haired, middle-aged woman with a rope attached to the stool that McGee was standing on, ready to yank it out from under him and plunge the junior agent to his death.

DiNozzo and Ziva, crowding in from behind him, guns in hands, ready to fire. Unable to get a clear shot without being inside.

One bullet in the wrong place would be disaster. If a fire fight broke out, there wouldn't be just one kidnapper down. There would be a dead NCIS agent as well. Maybe a dead lab rat, too, if a bullet hit something old and explosive.

"Hold your fire."

His agents halted instantly, guns still aimed at the woman holding the rope. One word from Gibbs, and she would never take another breath. Neither would McGee.

She knew it. She held her hand up in the air, displaying the rope that she had tied to her wrist in a clear threat. "I have nothing to lose."

That was a fact. This was a woman who had been pushed to the edge and beyond. Whatever her problems were, they were worse than the current situation and if they had to kill her she was more than willing to take a certain junior NCIS agent down with her.

Not if Gibbs could help it. "Abby?"

"This is Jason King's mother, Gibbs." His lab rat was terrified, uncertain of what to do. "She thinks he's innocent."

"He _is_ innocent."

"Okay." No need to ask who 'he' was. If he could keep this under control, Gibbs might be able to get everyone out alive. That was priority number one. "I'm willing to take that under consideration. Why don't you let everyone go, and we'll talk about it?"

"Not a chance, big fella." Mrs. King smiled crookedly at Gibbs. "I know better than that." She jerked her thumb at Abby. "_She's_ gonna prove it, and _then_ I'll let everyone go."

"Abby?" Gibbs didn't let his eyes stray from Mrs. King.

Abby bit her lip. "I have the answer, Gibbs. Jason King didn't murder Mariah Lovage. I have proof."

"You do?" Mrs. King swung around to face her, the rope taut in her hand and her hand shaking with eagerness. "Tell me."

"The math," Abby said nervously. "It's in the math. The footprint in the crime scene photo is too big to belong to your son."

"Explain yourself, missy."

"Yeah, Abby. Explain it." Gibbs eased himself away from the door so that DiNozzo and Ziva could slide their way in, hoping that Mrs. King wouldn't notice.

Futile hope. She noticed. She held up her hand with the rope tied to it in a clear threat. Gibbs halted.

Abby plunged in. "There were a bunch of footprints on the crime scene photo; two sizes, maybe three. One belonged to Mariah Lovage. It was a woman's size seven. There were like five really clear prints for her, and those were pretty obvious.

"There were also three footprints that belonged to a man, and those we can assume belonged to her murderer. We also know that Jason King wore a size nine and a half man's shoe. So the question was: what size shoe made those footprints? There's no way to make a direct measurement from the photo, because everything got reduced in size in order fit on the shot."

"So how did you determine that the footprint was too large to belong to the suspect?" Ziva too tried to distract Mrs. King.

"Simple math. It's stuff that most fifth graders are learning. It's usually an experiment where kids go outside to find out how tall a tree is by measuring its shadow. You can't measure the tree directly, but you can measure its shadow. You then take something like a ruler, and measure the shadow that the ruler makes. This gives you a comparison. If the twelve inch ruler casts a six inch shadow, you know that the shadow of a tree that is ten feet long is cast by a twenty foot tree. Make sense?"

It did. "So you were able to figure out how large the man's footprint was by comparing it to the woman's footprint," DiNozzo said, inching his own way in.

"I was. The man's footprint in the crime scene photo belongs to someone wearing a size twelve shoe," Abby told them. "There's no way that Jason King made that print."

"Then…he's innocent." Mrs. King was in shock. It had worked. Her plan to get her son exonerated had worked.

"It worked," Gibbs agreed instantly. Was Abby lying, to help get the two NCIS agents out of this spot? Didn't matter, not at the moment. Gibbs would use the distraction. "You can let them go. It's over."

Mrs. King snapped back. "No. Not yet. Not until my son is out of jail." She came to a decision. "I want to hear it from the governor, that my son is free. That he won't go back to jail once he's out of the hospital."

Gibbs cast a worried glance toward his junior agent. "It'll take a while. Let them go. We'll take the forensic evidence and present it to the governor."

"No! Now!" Mrs. King was insistent. "Call the governor now!" She tightened the rope until it was taut between her wrist and the stool.

"All right." Gibbs gave in. "I'm calling the governor." He held up his cell as evidence of his good intentions. "It's going to take a while to get through, even for me. I have to go through channels. I give you my word—"

"I don't believe you," Mrs. King told him. A tear sprang to her eye, leaking out and creating a streak of dusty moisture down her cheek. "I don't believe you. Too many people have given me their word, that they'd check out my son's story, and they haven't. Each one gave up. Each one told me that my son had done it, and I knew that he hadn't."

"I agree with you. I don't think he did." Gibbs gentled his tone. "You've got proof now. Abby checked out your son's story. She looked at the evidence, and she just proved that he couldn't have done it. Your son is going to go free." He moved a little closer to her. "Let's move this out of here. Let them go. You got what you wanted."

"Not yet." Judy King wasn't finished. "I want my son out of jail. I want him free." She glanced around. "I'm not a criminal," she said.

"I know you're angry." Gibbs dodged the concept. "You're a mother with a son in trouble. I get that."

"She can go free," Mrs. King said, nodding at Abby. "She did what I asked. She proved that Jason didn't do it. _She_ can go free," she repeated.

A concession. Gibbs was more than willing to take it. "Abby, go to Tony."

It was a start. Abby gingerly sidled around the edge of the room, keeping her captor in sight until she reached Tony DiNozzo.

DiNozzo grabbed her, and hustled the lab rat out of the ancient forensics lab. Gibbs could hear them out in the corridor. "You all right, Abby?"

Abby's voice was already thick with tears. "Tony…"

"You're all right, right?"

"Yes, but—"

Enough. One hostage safe. Now for the other one. Gibbs tuned them out, knew that DiNozzo would make sure that Abby was okay until Gibbs could see for himself. And if she wasn't? DiNozzo would deal with that, too.

"Let me go to my other agent," he cajoled. "You don't want this to get any worse than it is. You got what you want: proof that your son is innocent. We can end this now."

"Not yet." Judy King shook her head. "I want to hear from the governor that my son will go free."

"It will take time to track the governor down." Gibbs didn't let up. "I give you my word that I will personally speak to—"

McGee lost his battle to stay conscious, and his battle to remain standing. He slipped from the stool. The noose tightened around his neck.

Not even enough left to kick and twist in the air. Gibbs knew that the junior NCIS agent was seconds away from death. There was no time to waste; nothing to gain by talking.

"McGee!" He dashed forward.

Mrs. King fell back, the now useless stool tugged away by the rope that she'd tied to it. Unimportant; Gibbs left the woman to Ziva. Gibbs grabbed McGee by the waist, hoisting him up in the air through sheer strength, desperate to relieve the pressure around the man's neck.

Then DiNozzo was beside them, sawing at the rope. "Rule Number Nine," he grunted. "Always carry a knife." With a foot, he hooked the stool that McGee had been standing on and jerked it closer. He stepped up onto it, making it easier to apply more force and cut through the fibers of the rope. "Corollary to Rule Number Nine: keep the blade sharp."

"Less talk, more action, DiNozzo."

"Got it." The rope strands parted, and McGee flopped onto Gibbs's shoulder. DiNozzo helped ease the unconscious man to the dirty floor of the ancient forensics lab. "He breathing?"

"Just barely. Somebody get an ambulance."

* * *

_Odd feeling, this._

_Can't see a damn thing. Can't even tell if my eyes are open._

_Hands. Lots of hands, all of 'em pawing at me, pulling my shirt open, lifting me up…_

_Putting me on something soft. Cold. Crap, it's cold_. _I'm__ cold. The air is cold; smells nasty, too, with a plastic smell. Get that away from my face. Don't pull that mask tighter. Having enough trouble breathing right now._

_Buzzing in my ears. Can't hear a damn thing, either._

_Maybe I can. I hear somebody crying, in the background. Sounds like Abby. Abby, don't cry! Whatever it is, I'll fix it. Just don't cry! I don't think I could stand to hear you cry…_

_A face coming into view. Can't quite tell who it is. Pretty blurry. Not Abby. It's…it's…_

"Keep breathing, McGee. That's an order."

_I…I'll try, boss._


	10. Road Trip

"We use this thing maybe two, three times a year," Chief Ethan King confided to Gibbs, as if Gibbs was interested in the health status of the Kings Point residents. "Lucky for your boy that we had it running. Getting it ready to tote those pints of blood over to County General."

Right. As if it was okay for the sole ambulance in the entire town of Kings Point to spend even thirty seconds of time not in working order. What if someone had a heart attack, in the middle of town? The hospital alone was forty miles away, and the local clinic had shut down two years ago when the elderly, ought-to-have-been-retired physician passed away, standing at the bedside of one of his patients. Gibbs himself was acting as the senior medical officer on the scene, as the man with the most medical knowledge, most of it picked up here and there.

"Hurry it up," he growled. "You get those damn pints of blood on board now, or you'll be taking 'em yourself." Empty threat; four of the more than fifty pints belonged to McGee, and it was likely that the man would need them back. That blood was going with them if Gibbs himself had to pick up the cooler and throw it in the back with McGee.

Seconds counted. The ambulance had no driver; DiNozzo had been assigned that role, and was sitting behind the wheel, aching to put his foot to the pedal. The medical supplies on board had long ago been used up or expired until the only thing worthy of the medical profession was a half empty tank of oxygen. It would be entirely empty in another thirty minutes, which meant that the only medical treatment that McGee would have after that until arrival at County General would be a couple pairs of terrified eyes, watching him breathe and praying for a straight road to speed over.

Gibbs grabbed hold of the stretcher, doing his part to lift the thing into the back of the ambulance and locking the wheels into place. Abby was already inside, shaking, and Gibbs searched her face anxiously, fearing that he'd perhaps missed something. There was a bruise on one side of her face; if one of the rogue cops had hit her, there would be another murder before the day was out. Abby had already insisted that it had happened during the explosion that had drawn Gibbs to the ancient forensics lab. Gibbs believed her—for now.

Didn't mean that he wasn't going to have her checked out by someone qualified. Gibbs's lab rat had been kidnapped, slammed around, terrified out of her wits; yeah, seeing a doctor who didn't graduate in the bottom half of his or her class was next on the agenda, after which a certain trio of NCIS agents would be returning to Kings Point intent on tracking down the third and fourth members of the kidnapping party. Chief Ethan had Judy King and her nephew Zach in custody. That pair wasn't going anywhere.

There was another pair out there, still waiting to get themselves caught. There was Penny, the evidence clerk. A bit player? Maybe, but her bit was part of the crime that led to the man on the stretcher in the back of the ambulance and the girl beside him with a bruise on her face that meant that she wouldn't be wearing make up for a couple of weeks until the pain went away. The missing Evidence clerk would be explaining herself to a judge in the very near future, if Gibbs had his way.

The other was the second rogue cop, the other nephew of Judy King. The relationships didn't matter at the moment, but it did give insight into how the woman had suborned the two cops into helping her with her crime. There were a lot of family squabbles located smack dab in the middle of Kings Point, and Gibbs didn't want to get in the middle of any of 'em. That his team had been dragged into this one was a matter that he was fixing, and intended to fix on a permanent basis. The first rogue cop, Zach King, had surrendered meekly. It was clear that he regretted his role in the crime. He had gone in willingly, believing that he was righting the wrong done to his cousin Jason, but the other one—Will—was another story. Will hadn't surrendered. Will was running. Why? Gibbs wondered. Why run? It wasn't as though the man was going to be able to go back to his day job on Monday. Committing a federal offense didn't quite jibe with an upstanding police officer in blue.

Let him. It didn't matter how far he ran, Gibbs and his team would find him. Gibbs had already assigned Ziva to the task of tracking down both Will King and Penny Eaton. He didn't need Officer David for the transport of his two wounded chicks, but he did need her to keep the trail from going cold. He only hoped that he would be able to return to Kings Point before something fatal happened to the suspects.

Gibbs hauled himself up into the ambulance behind the stretcher, locking down the stretcher wheels and taking another look to make sure that his junior agent was still breathing. _Just what do you think you could do if he wasn't? Breathe for him? Forty miles means at least forty minutes at top speed. You think you could keep him alive for that long, with nothing but a half empty canister of oxygen?_

Gibbs locked that thought away where it couldn't get out and choke him. He banged on the side of the truck. "DiNozzo! Get this thing moving!"

"Right, boss." DiNozzo cranked the engine over, and it caught on the first try. Gibbs allowed himself a brief moment of amazement and then thanks that the thing hadn't required a jump start.

They left the small town of Kings Point behind in moments, DiNozzo's foot heavy on the gas pedal. Gibbs could see the buildings vanish, to be replaced by trees and shrubs along the side of the country road, the window in the back of the ambulance not adequate to do more than take an occasional glance. All it would tell them was whether or not they'd reached civilization and County General Hospital. Most passengers didn't care to know anything more than that, and Gibbs counted himself among them.

He had two choices: watch McGee breathe, or debrief his lab rat. Neither choice was attractive, but one had the added advantage that it would bring justice to a richly deserving piece of scum. He shoved his feet against the inner struts of the ambulance for better balance and slid a reassuring arm around the girl.

Abby melted into the proffered comfort, shaking. Gibbs subdued a frown; the girl was still terrified and he suspected that it would take too long for her to move past this slice of life—more, if McGee died because of it. _Hear that, McGee? You really want that on your conscience? It's another reason for you to keep breathing._

There was something he could do about it, and it would serve two purposes: put Abby's fears out into the open where they both could examine them, and give Gibbs himself clues as to where Will King might run. "Talk."

"Gibbs?" She turned large and round scared eyes up to him.

"Talk, Abby." Gibbs wasn't going to take no for an answer. They had forty minutes with nothing better to accomplish. "Take it from the top. They got you and McGee coming out of the diner."

"Yeah." The shaking got worse. Not a problem. Gibbs expected it, and he tightened his grip on her. "We weren't expecting it, Gibbs. I mean, they were cops! Nobody expects a couple of cops to jump you and throw you in the back of a squad car!"

"They took McGee down first." It was a logical deduction.

"They hit him, Gibbs! They hit him." Tears finally sprang to Abby's eyes, now that she no longer needed to be brave.

"Not gonna happen again." That was a fact. "They hit you, too?"

She bit her lip. "Yeah."

Gibbs commanded his blood pressure to remain steady. "Which one?"

Shaking. "I…I don't remember. I'm not sure."

Gibbs would find out. He would find out, and the perpetrator would be grateful that he was already behind bars because once he got out… Gibbs deliberately moved on. "They took you to the forensics lab in the cellar of the municipal complex."

"Yeah." Abby took a deep breath. "She wanted me to prove that her son was innocent. Mrs. King, I mean. Gibbs, she made me! She was going to kill McGee!"

"I know that, Abbs." He tightened his hold on her, only half because DiNozzo was swinging the ambulance around a curve on two wheels. "You kept him alive. That was your part of this mess, and you did it. He's still alive."

"But—" Abby couldn't keep her eyes off of the unconscious man strapped to the stretcher before them. With the ambulance rocking back and forth, neither one could see the gentle rising and falling of his chest to indicate that breath still remained within.

"He's alive," Gibbs emphasized quietly, "and he's going to stay that way. Right, Abby?"

Silence. Bitten lip.

He shook her gently. "Right, Abbs?"

"Yes, Gibbs."

"We've even got his blood, along with the other donated pints," Gibbs prodded. The large cooler had been stashed and locked down in one corner of the vehicle. "All they have to do is figure out which ones belong to him, and put them back where they belong."

"Yes, Gibbs."

Something was still wrong. "Abby? Talk to me."

The tremors increased. "Gibbs?"

"What, Abby?"

"Gibbs, Jason King is innocent."

"Innocent?" Of all the things Abby could have told him, that was not high on the list of probabilities. Gibbs had almost forgotten the original case. "Innocent, how?"

"Innocent, like he didn't do it." Abby looked away. "Gibbs, I helped convict an innocent man! Jason King didn't murder Mariah Lovage."

"You didn't convict him," Gibbs told her. "All you did was testify. You punched a hole in his alibi. Did you testify to the truth?"

"Well, of course, Gibbs!" Even through her misery, indignation shone through.

"Then _you_ didn't convict him. Somebody else set him up to take the fall." Gibbs made that a fact, and it _felt_ right. Jason King's mother's instincts were right. Her son was no killer, and Judy King was willing to sacrifice herself to prove it. He'd known since the moment he'd seen her, frightened and determined, with McGee's life in her hands.

It was time to acknowledge that sacrifice. "Give me the evidence, Abby," he commanded quietly.

The scientist surged up in the terrified girl and replaced fear with competence. "Two things, Gibbs." It was almost as if she was lecturing him from the safety of her lab back in D.C. "First, the fingerprint that they found on the murder weapon. It was only a partial, only the guy doing the forensics didn't tell them that. All he said was that it was a fingerprint, and that it matched Jason King. He didn't tell them that it could also match like a few thousand more people in this country alone."

"So you're telling me that he was in on it."

"Right now, I'm not going to go there, Gibbs. Some of the stuff I saw in that lab said that the guy was just really bad at his job. I was a little busy at the time to make the determination of whether it was deliberate." The shakes tried to creep back in. Abby banished them.

Gibbs went back to the original line. "So the fingerprint wouldn't have been enough to convict him, if the Kings Point forensics guy was doing his job right. You said two things. What was the other?"

"The shoeprint." Abby couldn't help herself; she looked at McGee, almost panicking before she saw his chest rise and fall once again, proving that the man was still alive. "Gibbs, McGee picked up on it. He's the one who thought that maybe the other footprints in the photos didn't belong to Jason King."

"Was he right?"

"Yeah. He was. None of the prints fit Jason King's shoe size."

"So Jason King really is innocent," Gibbs mused. "You have any clue as to who's guilty?"

"Somebody with a size thirteen men's shoe."

"So you're talking somebody who's pretty big."

She nodded.

"Abby?" There was something else, and Gibbs wouldn't let her stop. Not yet.

Deep breath. Shudder, and plunge in. "Gibbs, McGee told me another thing to do. All those names that popped up during the partial fingerprint match? There were like, thousands."

"And?"

"Zip codes, Gibbs."

"Zip codes?"

"Zip codes," Abby confirmed. "There were thousands of matches to the partial, but only about a dozen that are in Kings Point and the surrounding towns. Now, something like that wouldn't—or maybe I ought to say _shouldn't_—be enough for a conviction, but it does narrow down the search. Of those dozen in the surrounding area, I can cut that number down by almost half just by eliminating the women."

"Who does it narrow it down to, Abby?" Gibbs had a funny feeling.

"Gibbs, it could have been someone passing through Kings Point—"

"Abby?" No time for equivocation.

Abby inhaled, and let it out. "Will King."

Gibbs froze. "Will King, who aided and abetted?"

"The one and same." The shaking started up again.

Well, hell. No wonder Will King was running, if he was guilty. No wonder he'd volunteered to help his aunt prove his cousin's innocence. Probably wanted to keep an eye on things, figure out how close to the truth people were getting.

"We'll get him, Abby," he promised. He _hated_ to see the fear on Abby's face. "The murder is old—"

"—and the evidence may not be enough to convict. Not a _real_ forensics investigation."

"A possibility," Gibbs conceded, "but he's now wanted for kidnapping two Federal agents, and there's airtight evidence against him." He glanced at his watch. "Half way there, DiNozzo?" he called out to the cab.

"Just over," came the response. "Maybe fifteen, sixteen miles, if their directions were right—"

Gibbs's cell phone rang, and he looked at the screen before flipping the thing open, noting that it was Ziva. Had she apprehended Will King and Penny Eaton already? Good possibility, although Gibbs almost hoped that she hadn't. A good chase with a fight at the end of it would do wonders to assuage his own feelings of anger. "Ziva?"

"Gibbs? Gibbs, there has been an explosion in the forensics lab. No one was injured, but the evidence has been destroyed. The interior of the lab is ruined."

"On purpose?" This was not good.

"It is too early to tell. I have requested a forensics team from NCIS headquarters to assess the damage and ascertain the cause of the explosion. Director Vance indicated that he would send a team immediately."

"Chief Ethan object?"

"He did. I informed him that since the crime committed was against two NCIS agents, we held jurisdiction. He mentioned calling his local congressman to object, and I invited him to proceed. I believe that such an action would speed any number of resources to our location, including the assistance of the state police to set up roadblocks in the area to prevent the suspect from fleeing."

"Anybody see anything?"

"If they did, they are not yet volunteering the information." Gibbs could hear the barely controlled annoyance in the Mossad officer's voice. He devoutly hoped that she would keep it under control, and wondered if he should have left DiNozzo back in Kings Point and let Ziva drive. _The way she drove? Need to get there not just fast but in one piece—_

He issued orders. "Rope it off. Have the locals post a man to keep people out. You see what you can do to track down the suspects. The trail is still hot; that's more important right now than the crime scene." Gibbs had all the evidence against Will King that he needed right now, one sitting beside him and the other lying on a stretcher in front of him.

"On it, Gibbs." The line disconnected.

DiNozzo had heard only the lesser half of the cell phone discussion. "Boss?"

"Somebody blew up the crime scene," Gibbs informed him, knowing that Abby beside him was drinking in every word, "and all the evidence from the original case."

"Gibbs! That means that somebody doesn't want Jason King to get cleared."

"You got it, Abby. Little more to this mess than anyone first thought—"

_Blam!_

The ambulance slued around. DiNozzo cursed, fighting to keep the vehicle upright. Abby screamed, and Gibbs grabbed whatever he could. That included a certain lab rat. The girl already had too many bruises.

"Tire!" DiNozzo yelled.

Not just the tire. Gibbs's ear had caught the echo that told him that the tire hadn't blown due to overuse or shoddy manufacturing techniques.

The tire had been shot with a heavy caliber bullet. Whoever processed the crime scene would find it.

Wasn't going to be Gibbs. Gibbs was going to be going after the perpetrator who caused the heavy caliber bullet to go through the tire.

If he lived through the crash.


	11. Where There's a Will, There's a Way

Ziva stuffed the cell phone back into her pocket. "Addresses," she requested crisply. "Will King will be running. He has destroyed the evidence, and now he will seek to escape the locale. I need his home address, and I need an APB placed upon his vehicle."

"Here, now, little lady, you don't need to be going around trying to tell us what to do. This is our town—"

"And a federal crime has been committed here," Ziva interrupted. "This is no longer your jurisdiction, or must we have this discussion once again?"

"There's no need to get huffy—"

"You will assign a man to guard this crime scene until an NCIS unit can arrive," Ziva interrupted once again. Could the man not see past his own nose? He was worse than DiNozzo. Tony DiNozzo, at least, displayed competence at this work. This…this imbecile—Ziva clamped down on her emotions. "Does Officer King have a favorite spot, perhaps some place that he goes when he wishes to be alone?"

Chief Ethan thought, and made it plain that he was thinking and couldn't be disturbed while doing it. "Red Mustang."

"Where is the Red Mustang?"

"Where ever he drives it to," which was how Ziva deciphered that the police chief had returned to the topic of what car the suspect drove rather than a potential location for the suspect to hide. Ethan turned to someone sitting in front of a computer. "Pull up Will's records. Give the little lady Will's address and his plates."

Which was how Ziva found herself in the rental car, speeding toward a small house toward the outskirts of town, quickly outdistancing the local unit assigned to accompany her. She skidded to a stop in front of the address that Chief Ethan had given her.

The house was in good repair, with a rugged sort of "I can't be bothered" look about it. The placement of the blades of grass on the lawn was entirely unintentional as they competed—and lost—for space with the pine trees. Ziva would have missed the domicile entirely had it not been for the rutted dirt driveway that impacted the road at a ninety degree angle, doing its best to keep from being noticed between the trees. The suspect obviously thought that mailboxes were for sissies, since he didn't keep one. Ziva resolved to look for a postal box at the local post office. That would be equally as convenient for the suspect, since he reported to work next door to the post office five days a week.

Better: the red Mustang was still in the driveway, its trunk open and already bulging with luggage. Will King was preparing to flee, and was also preparing to take along a few hundred of his most favored possessions.

That would not happen.

Procedure was very clear: Ziva should notify her back up—the local Kings Point police division—that the suspect had been located and that they should hasten silently to the site in order to apprehend him.

Procedure wasn't so clear as to what the appropriate steps were when the suspect was closely related to over half the responding officers. Which side would actually receive back up?

Ziva decided not to take a chance. She left a swift message on Gibbs's cell phone—her boss didn't pick up. It was likely that they were in a dead zone for communications—and advanced to the front door.

She spotted the suspect through the window, stuffing yet more clothing into a duffel bag, oblivious to her presence. Another peek: his service weapon sat on the table near the television, far from where he could grab it. Ziva smiled tightly; she would not wait. When the local police arrived, they would find their suspect already in handcuffs.

Better and better: the front door was unlocked. Ziva was amazed at her luck. If all American criminals were so foolish, they would not need any investigators at all.

However, the suspect was large. Abby had described him as so, but Ziva knew from long experience that kidnap victims often ascribed more fearsome attributes to their captors than they actually possessed. This time, the forensics scientist had been accurate. The suspect stood at slightly below two meters in height, and Ziva estimated his weight to be nearly one hundred kilograms. In addition, the man was in shape. Muscles bulged as he placed item after item into a canvas duffel.

Ziva drew her own weapon, and pushed the door open. "Federal agent! Put your hands in the air—"

A load of crockery crashed down on her head, triggered by the opening of the door. Ziva cursed herself under her breath as she fell, knowing that she should have anticipated this. She clung to her weapon.

Will King had set it up, and he knew what to do. He whirled around and, seeing that there was only one Federal agent here to arrest him, kicked the gun out of Ziva's hand. Will King didn't want to go to jail, and only a small representative of Uncle Sam had arrived to oppose him.

He outweighed her by close to fifty kilos.

He loomed over her by more than twenty centimeters.

He didn't stand a chance. Not against a highly pissed off Mossad officer working for NCIS who had just sent two of her team to the far off hospital.

Nor was Ziva in the mood for dallying. There were local police officials who might or might not support her position. She made it fast.

Block the right hook. Knife hand to gut, double him over. Knee to the jaw going down.

Will King crashed to the floor, unable to do anything beyond groan.

Ziva remembered her training at the hands of Special Agent Leroy Gibbs, and refused to commit an act that would have the suspect speaking in a falsetto for the next several days, despite the fact that he richly deserved it for his treatment of Abby and McGee. Instead, she took a deep breath. "You are under arrest. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law."

As if former Officer Will King was able to say anything at all through his pain.

That, Ziva decided, was what one was entitled to after resisting arrest.

* * *

The ambulance teetered on the edge of the road, DiNozzo desperately turning the wheels to try to keep the top-heavy vehicle from toppling over and tumbling down the hillside beyond. He threw his own weight to the other side—every little bit might make the difference.

The ambulance quivered, undecided. A little bit more—DiNozzo strained, forcing, forcing the wheels to the right—

The ground at the edge of the road gave way. The back wheels went first, sliding over the hard paved edge onto the soft dirt beyond. Once invited, the front wheels followed and the vehicle tumbled over and over, down the hillside.

DiNozzo yelled a warning, as if either Gibbs or Abby hadn't already determined for themselves that they were in deep trouble. DiNozzo at least had his seat belt on; of the three in back only McGee could be said to be safely strapped in, and DiNozzo wasn't about to say that the junior agent would be any better off. Upright, upside down, then over again; the ambulance flipped and rolled until DiNozzo lost count of how many times the roof became the floor. He also lost count of how many times his head connected with the front dashboard.

_My head already hurts from a few days ago. Can't a guy get a break?_

* * *

Will King was quick to recognize the next faces through his front door.

"She assaulted me, Chief!" he yelled. "Arrest her! She assaulted me!"

Ziva's jaw dropped. Not at the actions of her suspect but at the expressions on the faces of Chief Ethan King and the two that had accompanied him. By the look of them, they were more than half ready to believe Will King.

And why shouldn't they? Here she was, a foreigner and a federal agent at that; people in these sorts of communities tended to look at national figures of authority with more than a little distrust. Will King was one of the clan, someone who was already a member of the local law enforcement, someone that had grown up here and was well-known. Ziva had dealt with these sorts of communities back home, where it was more important to be part of your clan than it was to obey the law. Appealing to their sense of justice wouldn't work.

Neither would attempting to march her suspect out of this place and into a truly secure cell. There were no secure cells nearby. Her only choices were the Kings Point holding cell and somehow transporting her suspect to a Federal lock up, the nearest one more than forty miles away. She couldn't get hold of Gibbs, not that he would be in any position to help. Gibbs and DiNozzo had a couple of higher priorities: Abby and McGee. No, Ziva would need to deal with this by herself.

She chose to push the issue. "On your feet," she instructed, taking firm hold of the suspect's arm, his wrists already clamped tightly in her handcuffs.

Will King groaned artistically. "I can't," he moaned. "Chief, she assaulted me! She busted in, and she hit me!"

There was always a chance that Will King was innocent. Abby wasn't here to identify him, and neither Judy nor Zach King had been willing to say anything yet as to who the third member of the group was. This could all be a huge misunderstanding, and Ziva could read the question in each set of eyes of her 'back-up'.

A mistake? When pigs fly, and Ziva kept kosher.

If the suspect could be up for an Academy award, then so could the arresting officer and Ziva was an expert actress. Furthermore, she had trained in a school where failure to play the role properly could lead to death.

She didn't quite bat her eyelashes, but it was a close thing. "Me?" she asked, surprised. "Assault you? Mr. King, you are much taller than I am, with much bigger muscles. Mr. King, are you trying to tell the chief of police that you were subdued by _me?_"

Rock and a hard place: would he live through the humiliation of being bested by a mere girl? It wasn't up to Will; Chief Ethan's eyes narrowed, and he took in the rest of the evidence: the open duffel bag stuffed with clothing, and the pile of crockery that had fallen from its perch over the door. Ziva could see the thoughts twirling in the police chief's head: which way would keep the police chief himself best out of trouble? Bucking the feds who had a well-deserved reputation for dealing harshly with those who tried to kill other feds, or throwing one single probably guilty-as-sin officer to the wolves?

Then Ziva spotted something else, sitting on the small end table. It was two things, actually, both hard black plastic and capable of performing thousands of calculations in bare seconds: Abby and McGee's laptops. She kept her voice calm as she pointed them out. "What are those doing here, Officer King?"

No choice: Chief Ethan turned to his men. "Take him in. Lock him up. We'll sort this out at the station."

* * *

No time to carefully pick himself up after the crash. No time to growl at DiNozzo for not keeping the ambulance on the road. Someone had deliberately blown out the tire. Flipping the vehicle had been an added bonus, and the recipient of the bonus was likely on his way down the grassy and now flattened hill to make sure that four NCIS agents didn't walk away from the crash. Gibbs needed to get moving.

Check the people around him: Abby had been crunched into a tight little ball at one corner of the crushed interior. "Abby?"

"Gibbs?" Hurt, but alive. Still breathing. There was blood trickling down her face, and Gibbs snarled under his breath. There had been entirely too many bruises on his lab rat, and Gibbs intended to rectify that matter. Abby took a deep breath, wincing. "Gibbs, I'm okay."

Lie, but in a good cause. "Can you stand?"

"Yes. Get McGee."

Best off of them all: the stretcher had remained hooked into place. Something had crashed down onto him, but McGee's eyes were open and he was struggling against the leather straps that secured him to the stretcher. A quick glance at the now empty oxygen canister showed that the plastic mask over his still bloodless face was completely useless. "Boss…"

"Stay where you are, McGee. Abby, help him off of the stretcher. See if you can contact anyone." Gibbs tossed his cell phone at her, knowing that she could make the dang thing work better than he could. He raised his voice to be heard in the front driver's seat. "DiNozzo?"

"King of stuck, boss." DiNozzo's voice had a strangled quality to it. "Cab got crushed in."

"Can you get out?"

"It'll take me a few minutes."

Translation: DiNozzo wasn't going anywhere, and had probably gotten himself mangled in the crash. No help there, and there was still the shooter to be dealt with. Gibbs made some fast and unsatisfying decisions. "I'm heading out," he announced grimly. "Abby, get McGee up and moving. Head for cover and call Ziva for help."

"What about Tony?"

"Leave him behind." Gibbs hated saying that, but the alternative was worse. Anyone remaining with the demolished ambulance would be a sitting duck for the shooter, and there were only two handguns with which to shoot back. Gibbs had one, and DiNozzo the other. Gibbs needed the other two NCIS employees to get out of the line of fire, and fast. DiNozzo could at least shoot back at someone.

"But…" Abby's voice trailed off as she realized what Gibbs was thinking.

Gibbs looked at her one last time before leaving, _looked_ at her and McGee and knew that DiNozzo was struggling behind the crushed metal of the driver's seat. It was the only option that held a snowball's chance in hell of getting anyone out of this mess alive, because Gibbs was going to go out fighting. He wasn't going to sit meekly around, waiting for the shooter to put a fast one between his eyes. He wasn't going to stand around, twiddling his thumbs, watching the shooter finish the job on the three other NCIS team members.

Had to be Will King. The rogue cop put in plenty of time on the practice range for his job, was clearly a good shot with a long range weapon. He had to be, in order to hit a tire on a moving vehicle. He was also the man who had the most to lose. When Abby—_when_, not _if_—when Abby testified to his part in the kidnapping, his career would be over, along with a couple of decades of life to be spent behind bars with people who had no love for former cops. Yeah, Will King would have plenty of reason to make sure that Gibbs and company didn't leave the scene of _this_ crime alive.

There was a grove of trees nearby. Gibbs scanned the hillside, looking for a figure making his leisurely way down the slope, coming to make sure that the crash had done its lethal work. He frowned; didn't see anyone. Where the hell was King?

Brain into overdrive. There had been two King nephews aiding and abetting Judy King: Will and Zach King. Zach had surrendered meekly, hadn't put up any fight at all. Had handed over his weapon as if he was relieved that his part was over. Mrs. King, too; she'd gotten what she was after. Abby had found the evidence that Jason King was innocent. That sort of thing would weigh heavily in her trial, and Gibbs would be willing to ask the judge for leniency—if McGee lived. There were times to live by the rules, and times to chuck the rule book over the nearest cliff. This was one of the chucking times.

Still no figure on the hillside. Had he gone off and left without making certain of his targets? Stupider things had been done. Taking a deep breath, Gibbs made a headlong dash to the trees, diving into the brush.

_Blam!_

The bullet buried itself in the tree trunk not two inches from where his head had been. Damn good shooting, and Gibbs with only a handgun. _Guess Officer King didn't leave quite yet_. Gibbs's own weapon was a handgun, which meant that King had the range on him, that King could nail him from a distance while Gibbs's bullet was falling to the ground in exhaustion.

Will King was a big guy, as big as his brother Zach. Gibbs had seen him, however briefly, in the police station. Was he big enough to leave a size thirteen shoe print at the scene of a murder some eight years ago? Good question to ask, and Gibbs intended to ask it as soon as he got them all out of this mess.

Gibbs was now in the underbrush, safe for the moment. The covering trees meant that he could also move around and not be seen, as long as he was careful not to let any of the leaves wobble from his passage. Gibbs would take advantage of that fact. He was certain that there were other people in this part of the country who were his equal as a woodsmen—but not all that many. That was not bragging, that was a simple statement of fact.

Gibbs dealt with facts.

* * *

The buckles on the stretcher came unhooked in mere moments. Of all of them, McGee had come through the crash with the least amount of damage and Abby considered that a minor miracle since there had been like a dozen mini-projectiles flying through the air. It was the stretcher, she decided. She and Gibbs had gotten thrown around when the ambulance rolled down the slope, but McGee had escaped that part of the ride since he'd been secured to the ambulance itself.

He was also awake, and that cheered Abby immensely. She wasn't sure how far or how fast she could have dragged him across the broken ground, and spending more than three milliseconds out in the open where the shooter could take aim sounded like a real good way to take a fairly permanent nap in her coffin back home. Abby wasn't ready for that and neither, she thought, was McGee.

He wasn't. McGee fumbled with the straps himself as soon as Abby had freed his arms, cursing under his breath when his fingers slipped on the rough canvas. "Come on," he said, swinging his legs over the side of the stretcher. "Let's go." He grabbed at the side of the ambulance, reaching for something to help haul himself up to a standing position.

He swayed, and Abby grabbed him. "McGee!"

Afterward, Abby would never be able to say whether McGee didn't offer any further comment because he couldn't or because he was afraid that he'd throw up. Both possibilities seemed equally likely. He clung to the side of the ambulance, fingers white, refusing to allow himself to slide down to the floor of the vehicle.

"C'mon, McGee." He could either hang on to the ambulance, or he could hang onto her, Abby realized, and hanging onto her meant escape. She made the decision for him, sliding under his arm and offering him support.

McGee took it—and they both tumbled in a mess of arms and legs out of the ambulance onto the cold and hard dirt.

In other circumstances it would have been funny. Now, it was only terrifying. "C'mon, McGee," Abby said again, grabbing his arm. "We've got to get out of here."

"I can do this," McGee told himself under his breath. "I can do this."

"You can do this," Abby agreed. She pulled him back onto his feet, staggering. She slipped back underneath his arm to provide much needed support.

"Wait—what about Tony?"

Abby kept going. "Gibbs said to leave him."

Only a tightening of the lips. "Okay."

That was the difference between a forensics scientist and a field agent. Abby had done her objecting with Gibbs himself, had questioned her boss. McGee didn't. McGee followed Gibbs instantly, knew the reasons behind Gibbs's decision so that he didn't have to question it. He didn't like it, but that wasn't important. McGee's opinion hadn't been requested.

He leaned heavily on her, directing her to keep the ruined wreck of an ambulance between them and where they presumed that the shooter was. It had to be Will King, Abby reasoned. He was the only one of the kidnapping trio still at large, and Abby knew why he was so eager to see a certain forensics scientist bite the dust. It was the reason that he'd blown up the crime scene. He wanted to get rid of the evidence. Once the evidence was destroyed, there was only the forensics scientist who'd recently handled the evidence to get rid of. Once the scientist was dead, there would be no way to convict Will King of murder. As soon as they were safe, Abby would call Ziva on Gibbs's cell phone, tell her that the suspect that she was after was here and shooting at them. Ziva would be on the road in an instant, speeding to their location.

A shot hit the dirt nearby, dust puffing up in its wake. Both Abby and McGee jerked with sudden terror, unable to dart away. "There!" McGee pointed to a boulder, big enough for them both to shelter behind. It wasn't much, but it was more than what they had.

Another shot, and they were almost there. The boulder was a mere twenty yards away; at the moment, it seemed like a mile.

DiNozzo could see their progress from where he was trapped inside the cab of the ambulance. "Keep going!" he yelled. "Hurry it up, McGeezer! This isn't an afternoon stroll in the park!"

McGee didn't answer, but Abby could feel the man summon forth another ounce of energy.

The shooter switched tactics. He couldn't get a clear shot at Abby or McGee, but he could take out another member of the NCIS team.

_Blam!_ The shot rocked the ambulance. A hole in the side appeared, but nowhere near where DiNozzo was stuck. Instead, the shooter was aiming for…

…the fuel tank.

The explosion wasn't large, but it served the purpose. It rocked the ambulance back and forth, and fire sprang out along the trail of gasoline and licked into the dried weeds beyond. Abby wheeled in dismay: Tony was in there, and he couldn't get out!

This was different. Gibbs had told her to take McGee to safety and leave Tony behind, but this was different! She couldn't leave him to be burned alive! That was the most horrible, painful death imaginable, and Gibbs couldn't have expected her to do that. Already she could see Tony wrenching frantically at the door, and where the steering wheel had been crushed inward into the cab and trapped his legs underneath it. She couldn't leave him to that fate!

"Tony!" she screeched.

"Keep going!" he yelled back, batting a small lick of fire that had crawled in through the broken glass.

Not a chance. "McGee," she commanded. "Get behind the boulder. I'm going back for Tony."

"You'll never get him out in time by yourself," McGee told her.

"McGee, don't try to stop me—"

"By yourself," McGee interrupted. "C'mon." Groaning, he reversed their direction, demanding more effort from his blood-starved muscles.

The door of the ambulance was already aiming for its melting point. Fire played around the fuel tank, threatening another explosion with shrapnel to toss into the air. Through the front cab, Abby could already see that flames had attacked the upholstery that lined the seats and had consumed the stretcher linens that McGee had been lying on not three minutes earlier. The fire was spreading fast. Abby yelped involuntarily when she grabbed the door to the driver's seat, intending to pull the door open. The handle was hot!

"Get out of here!" DiNozzo yelled at them through the broken window of the door. "You can't do anything! Get out of here!" Beyond him, Abby could see bright yellow flames eating into the medical supplies, sending smoke in every direction. A small _pow!_ and the almost-depleted oxygen canister briefly turned itself into a missile that careened out through the back of the vehicle, taking the same route that Abby and McGee had just moments ago.

"We're not leaving you," Abby told him, turning resolutely away from the devastation within. She wrapped the fabric of her shirt around the handle of the door and yanked.

Nothing.

"More leverage," McGee told her. He tugged at his belt, letting Abby help him slide it out from his pants. Together, they looped the leather through handle and pulled.

The metal groaned. They almost had it, the crack between the door and the side of the ambulance was widening, they'd be able to pull Tony out—

The handle came off. The bolts ripped from the metal, and Abby and McGee fell to the ground, the belt in their hands!

DiNozzo was the first to realize what had happened. "Go!" he yelled again. "Get out of here!"

"Not a chance, Tony." McGee was the first to pick himself up, surprising the heck out of all three of them. "C'mon, Abby."

This time the belt went around the edge of the door frame, using the crack made when they'd tugged on the door handle. Abby and McGee applied steady pressure, the crack widening faster when McGee put one foot against the wall of the ambulance to increase his leverage.

The door flew off, and the pair landed on the ground once more.

Now they could see what was holding DiNozzo back: the steering wheel. It had been jammed downward, crushing DiNozzo's legs underneath.

No time to waste, no time to respond to DiNozzo's continued demands that they escape and leave him behind. The belt had worked well and they used it again, stringing it through the steering wheel and grabbing hold.

End of his strength. Abby could tell that McGee wasn't going to be able to put out much more effort, but to stop now meant that Tony DiNozzo would die an agonizing death in the fire. She redoubled her efforts, using McGee as an example and putting her foot against the ambulance for leverage.

This was harder. The steering wheel didn't want to give. It stayed stubbornly where it was.

Not so McGee. The demands he put on himself became too much, and he slumped to the ground, eyes rolling back up into his head.

"Abby, give it up!" DiNozzo yelled. "Get out of here, and take McGee with you. That's an order!"

"Not listening, Tony." It was up to her. It was all up to Abigail Sciutto. There was nobody else.

Leverage. Fulcrum. Principles of science floated through her mind: _Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world._ Archimedes. One of the original scientists of Planet Earth. One of her heroes.

The lever: the long and unused metal IV pole from the interior of the ambulance. The fulcrum: the dashboard.

She didn't need to move the world, only a small piece of it, and in a hurry. She grabbed the IV pole, yelping and hurriedly using her shirt to protect her hand from the hot metal. Abby slid the rod through the steering wheel, positioning it so that she could use her own weight to help lift the wheel off of DiNozzo.

The metal creaked. It moaned, the sound covering DiNozzo's own hiss of pain as blood rushed back into his trapped legs.

Then McGee was there, his short rest on the ground enough to give him the strength to allow him to grab his fellow agent and pull. McGee didn't bother to stand—that would only cause him to fall down again—but he took hold of DiNozzo's own belt, hooking his fingers around the leather, and pulled.

DiNozzo fell from the cab of the ambulance on top of McGee. With a groan, he collapsed into unconsciousness, along with McGee. They were free.

Only half of the problem. There was still Will King up on the slope, and Abby wasn't about to say that Gibbs had gotten to him yet. In fact, Abby really really doubted it, 'cause if Gibbs had taken out the shooter then he would have been helping out here with the fire and getting the NCIS agents out of danger.

Two unconscious bodies, both of them NCIS agents and both of them heavy. Abby couldn't drag them behind the boulder at the same time. Both of them out in the open, along with Abby herself. Both of them easy targets for Will King and his rifle.

Which one to take first? It didn't look as though it mattered. Neither one was doing anything more active than breathing. Thinking wasn't on the menu.

Tony was on top, and to get to McGee she'd have to waste time rolling the senior agent to the side. That decided her; Abby grabbed Tony by the arms and started to drag him over to the boulder.

Another shot rang out, and Abby fell to the side in sudden terror. Had the bullet struck anything?

Not yet; the ambulance, flames crackling merrily, obscured the clear shot. Something flammable shot up toward the sky in a shower of sparks. Get to the boulder? Not gonna happen. Too much open space, with a straight line to a high powered rifle. The three of them had until the ambulance melted to a sodden plastic and metal puddle flat on the ground, and then Will King could calmly put three bullets into three NCIS employees, and then Ducky would be conducting three very straightforward autopsies. There wouldn't be any question whatsoever as to the cause of death.

There was only one thing that she could do. Gibbs had given her his cell phone. Abby could call Ziva for help. Would the Israeli officer get here in time?

Didn't matter. Not enough bars for a connection.

They were on their own.


	12. Know a Good Lawyer?

Ziva glared at her cell phone. Where was Gibbs? DiNozzo she would expect to be careless enough to allow his phone battery to run out of charge, but not Gibbs. Gibbs was on a case, and he did not do such things under these circumstances. Communication was paramount.

The explanation that he remained within a communication dead zone was likewise unsatisfactory. Between towns, between Kings Point and County General, she could see it. Now, however, it had been more than an adequate length of time to transport both Abby and McGee to medical care. Gibbs should have picked up the message that she'd left on his voicemail, and even if he had not, he should have responded to her next three tries at making contact.

This was more than irritating; it moved over into the category of worrisome. What had happened to her teammates?

The situation here was under control. Will King was safely incarcerated, and charges were being prepared. She had notified NCIS Headquarters, and a team of forensics was already on its way to sift through the evidence in the ancient forensics lab in the basement of this complex. There was no real rush for the team to get here; apprehending two of the three suspects in the act of kidnapping tended to persuade even an American jury of their guilt. The third suspect, Will King, had been arrested while attempting to flee. That too would figure prominently at his trial.

Ziva considered removing herself from the Kings Point police station. Her cause was just, but she was still collecting glares from Zach and Will King's fellow officers. _Blood was thicker than water_, she recalled the saying, and even though the pair were guilty there were still hard feeling floating around. Best not to allow the situation to escalate.

"I will leave the suspects in your custody," she announced to Chief Ethan King, carefully not acknowledging the relief that sprang to his face. "Once charges are filed, they will be transferred to the appropriate venue to await trial."

"That's good." Chief Ethan tried to keep a neutral tone in his voice. "You gonna be leaving before too long?"

"I will," Ziva replied, wondering what the man was worried about.

Her answer came faster than she expected. Alice Connors joined them, the Kings Point prosecutor also refusing to show any expression. "I'm sorry, Chief. I can't help you. Out of my jurisdiction. This is a federal crime."

"But—" Chief Ethan checked the flow of words. "I understand."

"Oh?" Ziva raised her eyebrows. This sounded pertinent—and suspiciously as though it was something that Chief Ethan King did not wish her to know. "Does this have something to do with the kidnapping of Ms. Sciutto and Special Agent McGee?"

"It does." Alice Connors had no problem telling her that, although Chief Ethan looked as though he was ready to pop a blood vessel with a face redder than a tomato. "The Kings' defense attorney has already filed a motion to request bail. Unfortunately, the charges have been filed in Federal court, rather than local. Judge Quentin King can't rule on the case. I reminded him of that, just a few minutes ago," she added. She sighed. "I suspect I'll lose the next several motions that I file."

_Very_ suspicious. "Who is the defense attorney?" Ziva asked, wondering if she already knew the answer.

The prosecutor had no trouble with that answer. "Gerald King."

"The same Gerald King who requested that Abby testify in person?"

"None other."

Ziva was quite familiar with efforts to keep suspects in a friendlier environment. That was standard the world over. "I can request to have them transferred to a Federal holding area more quickly," she offered. "In the meantime, Chief Ethan, I need you to warn Gerald King not to leave town. NCIS has more questions to ask of him."

"We'll keep the prisoners right here," Chief Ethan said quickly. "No need to put anyone out."

_Definitely_ angling for something. But what?

"And Gerald King?"

Chief Ethan gave in reluctantly. "Him, too. He's not going anywhere."

It was the best she could do. Ziva wished that she could talk it over with Gibbs, but he remained out of communication range. Where was her superior?

* * *

The shooter lay almost flat on the ground beside the road, using a small rock to steady the rifle. The scope on the rifle wasn't big, but it didn't need to be. The shooter was an expert with weapons.

Things were going well. The leader of the NCIS team, Special Agent Gibbs, was either dead or dying in the grove of trees. The shooter smiled viciously. There had been no movement among the bushes, indicating that the shot had been a kill shot. Gibbs was no longer capable of movement. The other three were hiding behind the burning ambulance, and that was also acceptable. Once the ambulance had burned to a blackened hulk, the shooter could place three leisurely shots. The witnesses would be dead. The murder case of Mariah Lovage would be dismissed for lack of evidence despite the presence of the female Israeli agent, even if convicted felon Jason King was released. Officer David could howl as much she liked to the authorities but without concrete evidence, the case would never be closed. There would be no convictions.

Life in Kings Point could go on.

* * *

Where was Gibbs? What was Abby supposed to do now? There were some twenty yards of open ground between here and the boulder that offered a few more moments of safety, and there were two unconscious bodies in front of her that needed dragging over to those moments of safety.

No possibility that the shooter had left. Abby had spotted a glint of sunlight on harsh metal that told her that the gunman was still up there, waiting for Abby to poke her nose out.

There wasn't much time. The ambulance was moving into the smoldering phase. Most of the combustibles had already been combusted, and now slender plumes of smoke rose toward the sky as the fire dwindled. A _crack_—an inner strut of the vehicle collapsed under its own weight, leaving an open skylight through the walls of the ambulance where a skylight didn't belong. Another few more _cracks_ like that, and the whole thing would fall into a heap of blackened metal that it would take a Forensics Team an entire week to sift through, and that was after they salvaged the bodies to figure out how many bullets it took for a gunman to escape justice.

Gibbs—still missing in action. Where was he? Had the gunman gotten lucky? Was her team leader lying wounded in the brush, unable to move just like the two field agents at her feet? Was he _dead?_

_Not a chance. Not a chance_. Abby chanted that to herself like a mantra, trying not to let the tears leak out. If the tears did escape, they'd make dark and runny little streaks down her face and that would look really cool if it were Halloween but it wasn't and she didn't really want to cry and _where was Gibbs?_

"Abby."

Abby whipped around. It was Tony, clutching his leg where the ambulance cab had crunched him.

"Should have…known better…than to come back to Kings Point," he groaned, pretending it was a chuckle. He shoved at the limp body next to him. "Wake up, McZombie."

There was an equal groan from the wishing-he-was-unconscious fellow field agent. "I'd rather not, Tony. And zombies aren't into blood. That's vampires."

"Whatever. Why aren't we dead yet? Gibbs get 'im?"

Silence.

"Abby?" With more than a frisson of fear.

"Abby?" DiNozzo asked again, this time raising himself up on an elbow. "Abby, where's Gibbs?"

He didn't ask again. The naked misery on Abby's face was answer enough, and DiNozzo didn't waste time saying the obvious.

The senior field agent took over, replacing _friend_ with _authority_. He rapidly assessed the situation, noting the glint of the rifle on the hill above them. He understood instantly what that meant and that the options weren't good.

"Abby, take this," DiNozzo ordered, pulling out his handgun from its holster and holding it out to her.

"Tony, I—"

"Take it," DiNozzo told her impatiently. "You've got Gibbs's cell? Good. Listen to me, Abby, and do what I tell you. I'm going to create a distraction. When I do, I want you to run to that boulder and then use it as cover to move further down into the brush."

"But that'll leave you and McGee behind—"

"You're going to call for help," he interrupted. "No arguments."

"But—"

"Call for help," DiNozzo ordered. "You're the only one with a snowball's chance of getting out of this, and somebody needs to know that the crime was committed. When I tell you, run. Find a spot where a cell tower is more than a pipe dream, and call Ziva."

"I'll take the other side," McGee said from his prone position on the ground. "That'll give him two distractions."

"You do that." No jokes this time. This was not a joking matter. DiNozzo wrenched himself up into a sitting posture, unable to keep from wincing. "Give me…a minute…to get into place."

"Or five minutes." McGee rolled over onto his belly, choosing not to try to get to his feet.

"I…" This time it was Abby who couldn't complete her thought. She bit her lip. "Okay."

"Remember," DiNozzo cautioned, "when you start running, don't stop. Don't stop for anything. Get out of range, and call Ziva."

* * *

Things were about to happen. There was movement around the still burning hulk of an ambulance which made it clear to the shooter that the survivors were planning an escape.

That would not happen. There were three people alive, hiding behind the wreck. Of those, only one was mobile and that was the one that the shooter would aim for. The other two would attempt to provide distractions, which meant that the shooter needed to remain calm and wait for the mobile NCIS agent—it was the forensics woman, the one who'd caused all the problems in the first place—for the woman to bolt. The other pair, the driver and the escort, could wait until there was no cover left. The driver still had his service weapon but the shooter's rifle had nearly twice the range. It would not be an issue.

There was still no movement from the grove of trees where the NCIS team leader had attempted his own escape. The shooter's initial shot had been dead on, with an emphasis on _dead_. There would be no further interference from that quarter.

This episode of life would be over within the hour. All four NCIS agents would be dead, with no trace of evidence left behind this time. The female agent in town would return to Washington, unable to proceed further. The feds would send out team after team to search for clues, and would find none. Life in Kings Point would go on without further interference.

Good tactics from the NCIS people. The driver was at one end of the burning hulk, and the escort was hoisting himself to his feet at the other end by grabbing onto a sturdy tree. The shooter remained cool. The two would flee as fast as they were able in a moment, attempting to distract the shooter from the true target: the lab rat, who would be aiming for the boulder with its promise of more substantial cover than anything else around. Should the lab rat achieve her objective, it would be that much more difficult to kill her and prevent her escape.

The lab rat it would be. The shooter would allow the other two a few more moments of life while they watched their only hope be gunned down with a single well-placed bullet. The shooter readied the rifle, balancing the long barrel on a solid rock dug deep into the ground.

Both injured NCIS agents poked their heads out from either side of the burning ambulance at the same time. It was clear that they were working together.

The shooter took aim. The lab rat would dash out at any moment. It would take only one bullet. Only one properly aimed bullet—

"You'll be dead before you squeeze that trigger."

* * *

"Gibbs!" Abby scrambled out from behind the boulder, amazement uppermost in her mind from two sources: one, that she hadn't been gunned down while running for the boulder and two, that her team leader was not only alive but in control of the situation. "You're alive!"

He quirked his eyebrows at her, encouraging the shooter—now in handcuffs, with the rifle in Gibbs's own hands—to hustle down the slope to his team. "Some reason you thought I wasn't?"

"I…You…" Abby was speechless. It didn't happen often, and this was one of the rare times that the lab rat could think of nothing to say. That didn't mean that she didn't communicate. The relieved and exuberant hug that followed said more than words could ever express.

DiNozzo hauled himself up against the tree that he'd crawled to in his attempt to distract the shooter. "Never had any doubts," he lied.

McGee stared at the shooter. "Who's that?" he asked, his voice trailing off as he almost recognized the person that Gibbs had in custody. "That's…"

"That's Penny!" Abby exclaimed.

"Damn fine shot," Gibbs acknowledged, leaning her rifle against his shoulder with an unreadable expression, his own handgun tucked back in its holster. "Almost nailed me."

Penny Eaton glared back at him. "I should have!"

"Mind telling me why you're out here?" The mildness in Gibbs's voice was deceptive.

"I want a lawyer." Penny Eaton refused to talk.

She didn't need to. The imaginary light bulb that went off over Abby's head was bright enough to outshine the sun.

"It was you!" she exclaimed. "I knew there was something funky about that crime scene photo. It was you!"

Penny only tightened her lips.

Gibbs raised his eyebrows. "Abby?"

"It was the photo," she repeated. "Remember, McGee? You looked at it, too, and it didn't seem to quite jibe with what the report said."

McGee looked up. "That's right. There were so many footprints that I couldn't make them out."

"And I thought that maybe the forensics guy had gone in and really separated them according to shoe size," Abby said, "until I realized that he didn't. If he couldn't be bothered to actually work out a partial fingerprint properly, he wouldn't worry about making sure that all of the footprints belonged to either the victim or the suspect. There wasn't just _two_ people at the crime scene. There were _three_. There was the size seven woman's that belonged to the victim, Mariah Lovage, there was the size thirteen men's that belonged to Will King, and the size eight that belonged to somebody else."

"Don't tell me; let me guess," DiNozzo said from his oh-so-comfortable perch on the ground, staring at the shoes of Gibbs's handcuffed captive. "The third set of footprints belonged to: Penny Eaton. You wear a size eight, Ms. Eaton?"

No answer; only a glare. DiNozzo went for a victorious grin, knowing that he didn't need an answer from Penny Eaton. A quick look inside her shoe for the label would be all the answer he needed.

Abby nodded. "Maybe. Perhaps. I'll have to do some more work to prove it. Some _real_ forensics work," she added darkly, "not something slipshod in an ancient lab located in a back corner that thinks that a weak hypochlorite solution is all they need to whitewash the evidence."

"Too bad all the evidence was blown up, along with that forensics lab," Penny sneered, pulling herself together. "No evidence to work on. Even you with all your fancy equipment won't be able to pull any photos out of the ashes."

"Absolutely right," Abby agreed with suspiciously good cheer. "If there was any fire associated with the explosion, chances are very good that the original crime scene photos were charred and ruined to the point where any attempts to discern accurate measurements for the footprints would be an exercise in futility."

"Abby?" It was a straight line. Gibbs had no idea what rabbit his lab rat was about to pull out from a hat, but he knew the signs.

"I sent emails," Abby told him, "emails when I was trying to let someone know where we were. Of course, I couldn't write anything with words, 'cause the two cops were looking over my shoulder all the time. I had to send something that looked like I was working the evidence but that someone back home would be able to recognize. Would you like to know what I sent?"

McGee suddenly grinned. "I'll bet I know. I'll bet that each email took a long time to move out through the server. Graphics files always do."

The tech talk was over Gibbs's head, but the grin wasn't. "Let me guess: you sent copies of the crime scene photo."

"Yup. Complete with all the footprints, just waiting for somebody like me to measure 'em. Sent 'em to you, Gibbs, and to my own email back in my lab, and to Ducky, and to Tony, and to Director Vance. I sent 'em like to everyone!" Abby beamed, pleased with herself.

Gibbs turned to his suspect. "Hope you know a good lawyer."


	13. Epilog

"McGee snores," DiNozzo announced from his hospital bed. One side of his bed looked bulkier than the other, the covers doing their best to hide massive bandages on his leg. A tall pole stood next to him, a large bag of intravenous fluids slowly dripping into his arm. A closer look at the senior NCIS agent revealed the widened pupils that suggested that a certain amount of self discretion had been removed by adding morphine to the intravenous fluids. Tony DiNozzo was no longer feeling any pain.

"I do not, Tony. You do."

"Hah. Now I know that you don't know what you're talking about, McWheezer. You've been asleep for the last hour, and I've been listening to you snore. _I've_ been awake."

It was banter, and it sounded good to Gibbs's ears. There had been far too many moments over the past few hours where the possibility of needing to replace a few damn fine team members had crossed his mind. There had been DiNozzo, passing out when the squad had finally arrived to put him into a carrying stretcher to tote him up the hill to where the ambulance—a real one, this time, from County General—waited. Gibbs's heart itself had almost stopped beating when the man went limp during the transfer from the ground onto the stretcher. Blood leaking out around the torn pants, mouth gaping open in an attempt to inhale more oxygen; flashbacks about men under his command who had died defending others ripped through him. Light fading from the eyes—_dammit_, there wasn't much that Gibbs feared but losing one of his team? Too great for any man to bear.

Ziva had arrived ahead of the County General ambulance. Too much time had passed, she had decided, that she had been out of contact with her team leader, so she had confiscated McGee's car—"you _hotwired_ it, Ziva? I just had that thing serviced!"—and had set off after them, reasoning that if everything was fine, she would simply catch up with everyone at County General. Between she and Gibbs, they had managed to help McGee stagger up the slope to the road to wait for help to arrive. Gibbs was proud of McGee. The man had collapsed only twice during the long trek uphill, beads of sweat standing out on his too-white face. It was a relief to lower the man to the pebble-strewn side of the road and instruct him to stay flat until someone writing MD after his name told McGee that he could get up.

Even Abby was staggering, now that the adrenalin had stopped flowing. Broken rib, the ER doc had told him, to go along with the long bruise on her face. Abby wouldn't tell him exactly when it had happened, but Gibbs would find out eventually. It would come out in the trial of Will King and Penny Eaton, which would be brief and to the point. Until then, Gibbs intended to keep a very close eye on her. His lab rat was going to pampered and cosseted until this nightmare was nothing more than a bad memory.

Will King had already broken, and confessed. Jason King had not been involved in the murder of Mariah Lovage, just as his mother had insisted. Knowing that Jason would have no alibi, Will and Penny had shifted the blame onto their cousin. It had been Will who had raped Mariah Lovage. She had refused him in no uncertain terms, making fun of him and humiliating him. Will had simply taken what he had wanted.

Penny had arrived and found the pair but instead of coming to Mariah's rescue, she had accused Mariah of seducing Will. Penny, according to Will, had been the one to stab Mariah to death in a fit of jealous rage. Penny's version was slightly different, insisting that Will had wielded the knife and that Penny's only crime was to remain silent while Jason King was convicted.

"Not a problem, Gibbs." Abby developed a determined glint in her eye when Gibbs recounted the story, a glint that contrasted nicely with the bruise. "I'll be able to show Kings Point what happens when you get a _real_ Forensics Lab involved. They are both going _down!"_

Didn't matter who did what; not to Gibbs. The pair, along with Judy King and Zach King, were being held on charges of kidnapping two Federal agents, and that was the charge that required absolutely no further evidence for a conviction. Penny and Will would be going away for a long time. Gerald King, too; the man had been the prosecuting attorney back then, and had eased the way for the miscarriage of justice. The state bar association had already started proceedings to remove the man's privilege to practice law, not that he would have much opportunity to practice while behind bars.

Not so Mrs. King, and Zach too had been cooperating with the authorities. A crime had been committed eight years ago, and those two were simply trying to right the wrong. It hadn't been the best way, but Gibbs wasn't about to say that he himself always went through proper channels. NCIS would recommend leniency for that pair.

Gibbs turned back to his two agents, each lying on white linens and pretending that standing wasn't beyond their current physical capabilities. "Director Vance is sending out a chopper to ferry the two of you back to D.C.," he informed them. "By then, McGee, this place should have figured out which pints belong to you and put them back where they belong."

"Can't do it, Gibbs," Abby put in. "All the blood? Ruined. They got dumped out of the cooler and into the dirt."

"And they are part of the evidence," Ziva added. "I spoke to the Forensics Team that Director Vance sent out, and they have told me that most of the blood had leaked out of their bags when the fire in the ambulance melted the plastic." She indicated the dark bag dripping blood over McGee's head. "Each member of the Forensics Team, however, has taken a few moments to donate an additional pint of blood so that there is an adequate supply to support McGee's recuperation."

DiNozzo developed a grin. "Even ol' Greatling? Slimy, always sick-looking Greatling?"

"They check the blood for contamination," McGee told him, muttering under his breath, "I hope."

"Good." Gibbs moved on to more important things. "In the meantime, Ziva and I will escort Abby back to D.C. We'll get your car back home, McGee."

"You, boss?" McGee tried unsuccessfully to keep the dismay off of his face, wondering if he'd paid his last car insurance bill on time.

"You got a problem with that, McGee? You want Ziva to drive?"

"No, boss." McGee's word were all but strangled.

"Good. I'll see you back in D.C." Gibbs took Abby by the arm, escorting her and Ziva out. If he held the lab rat a little closer than usual, neither one was objecting. It had been a near thing.

McGee turned to DiNozzo. "Next time, Tony, _you_ go to Kings Point."

"Are you kidding? I _still_ got dragged here, and it was all your fault, McWitless."

"It was your fault for falling down the stairs in the first place!"

"You were on escort duty, and you let yourself be kidnapped!"

"I didn't 'let' anything. Who would have expected a couple of cops to be dirty?"

"Haven't you ever seen 'Witness'? _Everybody's_ dirty. Wake up and smell the Starbucks, McClueless."

Gibbs stuck his head back in. "Hey! Keep it down in here. You're supposed to be resting."

Abby tucked her own head under Gibbs's arm. "Bye, guys. See you in D.C." She winked, still holding onto her boss. "We gotta get going. I think Gibbs and Ziva made a bet with the chopper guys as to who could get back to D.C. fastest, you two in the chopper or us in McGee's car." She grinned. "We're gonna go straight through the main drag of Kings Point!" Both she and Gibbs disappeared from view, closing the door behind them.

McGee glared at DiNozzo. "I hope you're satisfied. My car will get wrecked, and we're going to crash down in the Appalachian Mountains with a pilot trying to win a bet."

DiNozzo relaxed against the comfortless pillows. "As long as the chopper doesn't drop into Kings Point, I'm satisfied."

McGee opened his mouth to object, and then thought better of it. "Me, too."

The end.


End file.
